Munich-based QuantumDiamonds (QD) today announced the close of a €91 million funding round to scale production of its quantum-based semiconductor inspection technology. The financing combines an €15 million equity round led by World Fund with €76 million in non-dilutive funding approved at EU level under the European Chips Act. The
Rahul Raj
Munich-based QuantumDiamonds (QD) today announced the close of a €91 million funding round to scale production of its quantum-based semiconductor inspection technology.
The financing combines an €15 million equity round led by World Fund with €76 million in non-dilutive funding approved at EU level under the European Chips Act. The non-dilutive funding was provided jointly by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy and the Free State of Bavaria.
The €15 million equity round led by World Fund attracted significant participation from Bayern Kapital, alongside QD’s existing investors IQ Capital, Earlybird, First Momentum, UnternehmerTUM, Creator Fund, Onsight Ventures, and angel investors.
Kevin Berghoff, CEO and co-founder of QuantumDiamonds, said, “This is a major step in bringing quantum sensing into fabs worldwide. The response from leading chipmakers has been clear: they see our technology as essential for solving yield challenges that today’s systems can’t address. With deployments now live in the U.S. and Taiwan and serial production ramping up in Munich, Europe isn’t just participating in the next chip era, it’s helping define it.”
Co-founded in 2022 by Berghoff and Dr. Fleming Bruckmaier (CTO) as a spin-out of the Technical University of Munich, QD manufactures semiconductor inspection technology that enables the world’s leading chipmakers to non-destructively analyse their most advanced chips.
The company states that it has developed a microscope for electric currents that detects hidden defects, improves production yields, and accelerates development cycles for next-generation packaging technologies.
According to QD, traditional semiconductor inspection tools slow development and production as they struggle to see buried defects in complex 3D chip architectures, which lowers production yields and raises costs for businesses and consumers. “The stakes are high: industry analysis shows that a single percentage point improvement in yield can be worth millions of dollars a week for a high-volume device,” QD mentions in the press release.
QD claims that its technology addresses this central challenge in advanced chip manufacturing by harnessing atomic-scale defects in synthetic diamonds to detect magnetic fields with extreme precision — effectively a microscope capable of seeing electricity flow through chips. QDm.1, the company’s first commercial system, enables non-destructive 3D current imaging at the nanoscale, pinpointing the precise location and depth of chip defects.
In March 2026, the company expanded into Asia by setting up a regional hub in Taiwan and naming industry veteran Peter Lemmens, who previously served as General Manager Taiwan at IMS Nanofabrication and imec, as Managing Director Asia.
The following month, QD installed its first U.S. system at Eurofins EAG Laboratories in Sunnyvale, California, and completed its first Asian deployment at Integrated Service Technology (iST) in Hsinchu, Taiwan, at the heart of the world’s most advanced semiconductor cluster.
In December 2025, the company unveiled plans to invest €152 million to build what it calls the world’s first production facility for advanced chip-testing systems. The new facility will include sensor production lines for quantum-grade diamond substrates, cleanroom integration of QDM inspection systems, joint development labs with semiconductor partners, and application support for fab integration and inline process control. The site will manufacture QD’s current and successor systems. QD expects to open the first operational section of this production facility in Munich later this year.
“Compute has become strategic infrastructure. Europe uses around 20% of the world’s semiconductors while producing only 10%, and that gap is exactly where our strategic power leaks away. QD can become Europe’s next ASML: a first-of-a-kind technology, built and scaled here, in a $104 billion equipment market that the entire AI economy depends on. Backing companies like QD is how Europe stops buying its technological future from others and starts building the leverage to shape its own,” said Daria Saharova, Managing Partner at World Fund.
The German startup plans to use this fresh funding to deliver lab systems to leading chipmakers and advance wafer-level capabilities for high-throughput fab inspection. QD, which currently employs 70 people, plans to more than double its engineering team within the next 12 months.
QD is already engaged with nine of the world’s top ten semiconductor manufacturers. The company is poised to be the only startup to receive manufacturing funding under the European Chips Act, which aims to bolster Europe’s semiconductor supply chain. It joins well-known industrial leaders like GlobalFoundries and Carl Zeiss.
