AlixLabs, the Lund-based semiconductor process startup developing Atomic Pitch Splitting (APS™), has completed its €15M Series A with a strategic top-up from Finnish investor Stephen Industries. The company is targeting beta testing with chipmakers in 2026 and manufacturing deployment by 2027.
AlixLabs, a deep-tech semiconductor startup based in Lund, Sweden, has closed its €15 million Series A following a strategic investment from Stephen Industries, a Finnish investment company.
The round was completed in two stages: a €14.1 million first close announced in November 2025, and a final top-up from Stephen Industries in Q1 2026 that brought the total to €15 million.
The company is developing proprietary Atomic Layer Etching technology, specifically its APS™ (Atomic Pitch Splitting) platform, aimed at enabling more precise and significantly cheaper advanced chip manufacturing.
The strategic dimension of the Stephen Industries investment lies in its chairman and president, Kustaa Poutiainen, whose previous work at Picosun, a Finnish company that built Atomic Layer Deposition equipment and became a global leader in its field before being acquired, maps directly onto AlixLabs’ technological domain.
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ALD and ALE are closely related processes: ALD deposits material one atomic layer at a time; ALE removes it with the same precision.
Poutiainen’s experience in scaling a niche atomic-layer process into an industry standard is what AlixLabs CEO Jonas Sundqvist described as “especially valuable as we move from development toward broader commercialisation of our APS™ platform.”
The technology AlixLabs is commercialising addresses a specific and expensive problem in advanced semiconductor manufacturing.
As chip architectures become more complex, the conventional approach to creating the extremely fine patterns required, multi-patterning, which involves repeating the lithography and etching cycle multiple times, becomes both prohibitively capital-intensive and energy-hungry.
EUV (extreme ultraviolet) lithography can reduce the number of patterning steps, but EUV tools cost upwards of $400 million each and require specialised infrastructure.
APS™ offers an alternative: it uses atomic-precision etching to split a single coarser pattern into two finer ones, reducing the need for both multi-patterning steps and EUV tools.
The November 2025 tranche of the Series A was led by three returning investors, Navigare Ventures, Industrifonden, and FORWARD.one, alongside two new investors: STOAF, a Swedish institutional fund, and Global Brain, a Japanese venture capital firm that manages strategic funds focused on semiconductor startups.
The inclusion of Global Brain extends AlixLabs’ reach into the Japanese semiconductor ecosystem, where foundry customers and equipment buyers are highly active. Other investors listed on the company’s cap table include LU Holding (Lund University’s investment vehicle), Almi Invest, Polynom Invest, and the Nylander family.
The company recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding with VDL ETG Projects, a Dutch precision equipment maker in the high-tech manufacturing supply chain, for the industrialisation of its APS™ patterning technology.
AlixLabs also received notice of patent allowance in Taiwan for a selective etching nanostructures patent in February 2026, and secured EU trademark registration for “Power ALE”, a variant of its etching process.
The Taiwan patent allowance is strategically significant: TSMC and other major foundries are headquartered there, and intellectual property protection in that jurisdiction matters directly to commercialisation.
APS™ beta testing with key customers is targeted to begin in 2026, with full manufacturing implementation planned for 2027. Proceeds from the full €15 million round will be used to expand R&D and production capacity in Lund and the Netherlands, deepen collaborations with foundry partners, and accelerate the industrial deployment of APS™.
The company sits within a broader push by European institutions and investors to develop European-owned semiconductor process technology at a time when dependence on Asian and US supply chains has become a strategic concern.
