Innovation Industries leads the Series A. imec.xpand, Invest-NL Deep Tech Fund, QBIC, HTGF, and BOM return. Total funding now stands at €55m. The money funds in-house chip design and a push toward volume sensors built on the company’s NCOS color-splitting technology.
Eindhoven-based eyeo has raised €40m in Series A funding to commercialise a sensor technology that, in the company’s framing, removes a constraint that has shaped digital imaging for fifty years.
The round is led by Innovation Industries, with existing backers imec.xpand, Invest-NL Deep Tech Fund, QBIC, High-Tech Gründerfonds, and Brabant Development Agency (BOM) participating. Total funding raised by eyeo now stands at €55m.
The financing benefits from European Union support under the InvestEU Fund.
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The technical premise is direct. Every conventional digital image sensor, whether in a smartphone, a car, an XR headset, or a security camera, sits behind a Bayer-pattern colour filter that lets red, green or blue light through to each pixel and rejects the other two.
Useful, but expensive: roughly 70% of the incoming light never reaches the photodetector. eyeo’s Nanophotonic Color Splitting platform, branded NCOS, works on the inverse principle.
Instead of filtering, it splits, guiding each photon to the pixel that should record it. The patented design, eyeo says, captures three times more light than a comparable filter-based sensor and breaks the resolution limits imposed by sub-micron pixel geometry.
The platform is built around 26 patents and is compatible with existing CMOS sensor platforms, which matters for adoption by the world’s tier-one sensor vendors.
Jeroen Hoet, eyeo’s co-founder and CEO, framed the milestone in terms that emphasised the company’s transition from research to commercial scale.
“Every modern device that sees the world, from smartphones to autonomous systems, is held back by the same 50-year-old constraint,”
Hoet said. “eyeo removes it at the source. Our technology is proven, patented, and validated at a commercial foundry, with tier one customers already engaged. This €40 million round gives us what we need to scale.”
The company has worked toward this point for seven years. Eyeo spun out of imec, the Belgian research institute, and has spent that time developing and proving the NCOS approach in collaboration with imec’s nanoelectronics group.
The company has now completed process integration at a commercial foundry, signed multiple tier-one engagements, and opened a dedicated sensor design centre in Antwerp earlier in 2026 to complement its Eindhoven headquarters. The team has quadrupled in the past year.
The Series A will fund three priorities. The first is building out the IC and system-architecture design team at the new Antwerp centre.
The second is developing and releasing next-generation color-splitting image sensors in 3D-stacked CMOS technology, which is the configuration that the leading mobile-camera vendors have moved to over the past five years.
The third is growing sensor sales and commercial partnerships across smart-city, industrial, XR, and mobile markets.
Eyeo cites a $30 billion total addressable imaging market and roughly seven billion image sensors sold each year as the demand backdrop.
The lead investor’s framing took the broader category view. “eyeo is delivering the kind of foundational breakthrough that redefines an entire category,” said Nard Sintenie, partner at Innovation Industries.
“This is a powerful example of deep-tech innovation driving real structural progress in semiconductors, with implications that extend across the broader technology ecosystem.”
The framing fits the rising European deep-tech VC commitment to chip startups, with Innovation Industries having raised a dedicated semiconductor and photonics fund in recent years and imec.xpand having opened a dedicated Dutch office to focus on the Eindhoven region.
The geographic centre of gravity for eyeo’s category sits in the same corridor. Eindhoven’s wider photonic-chip cluster has clustered around imec, PhotonDelta and the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven, with adjacent companies including Photon IP, SMART Photonics and PhotonDelta-backed startups working across silicon-photonic, integrated and now nanophotonic regimes.
eyeo extends that cluster into the image-sensor stack, which until now has been dominated by Sony, Samsung and OmniVision and has had relatively few European players at the leading edge.
What eyeo is proposing technically is part of a longer arc. long-running research into rebuilding the image sensor itself has been a recurring subject in optical-engineering research for two decades.
Multiple academic and corporate teams have explored splitter, plasmonic and metasurface-based alternatives to the Bayer filter, most of which have stalled in the gap between laboratory demonstration and manufacturable yield.
eyeo’s claim is that the NCOS process has cleared that gap, and the company’s Series A investor list suggests its diligence partners agree.
The applications the press release names are conventional but commercially serious. Smartphone cameras, where the constraint between physical sensor size and image quality has shaped every flagship release for a decade.
XR headsets, where pass-through camera quality is the single biggest determinant of perceived immersion. Smart-city infrastructure, where dynamic-range performance under low light is the bottleneck for accurate analytics.
Industrial machine vision, where the same constraint shows up in different terminology. Autonomous-driving stacks, where the cost-and-resolution arithmetic of vehicle cameras has been a persistent design constraint.
A sensor that delivers three times the light sensitivity at sub-micron pixel pitch addresses all of these without requiring the OEM customer to redesign anything downstream of the sensor itself, which is the practical reason eyeo’s CMOS compatibility story is important commercial language rather than just engineering throat-clearing.
The Series A round is sized to match that ambition. €40m is large for a Dutch deep-tech Series A and reflects both the capital intensity of bringing a sensor to volume production and the strength of the syndicate’s conviction.
Innovation Industries leading, alongside imec.xpand and Invest-NL Deep Tech Fund’s continued participation, signals that the European deep-tech investment community is willing to commit growth-stage capital to a single semiconductor breakthrough when the underlying science is sufficiently differentiated and the manufacturing readiness is sufficiently proven.
What happens next is the standard semiconductor-startup test. eyeo needs to demonstrate that its tier-one customer engagements translate into volume design wins, that its sensor performance in customer hands matches the figures published in foundry validation, and that the Antwerp and Eindhoven sites can hire and retain the IC-design talent required to ship product on the cadence the market expects.
None of those is trivial. All of them are well-understood. The €40m gives the company the runway to execute on them.
Hoet’s closing characterisation summed up the company’s view: a technology that is “proven, patented and validated at a commercial foundry, with tier one customers already engaged.”
The Series A is a vote that the customers and the foundries are ready to take eyeo’s claim about the 70% number to volume production.
If they are, the company has the kind of foundational position in image sensors that has been rare in European semiconductor history.
