The equipment that prints the light-guiding layer inside AR glasses is a small industry with one loud bottleneck, and a Dutch company just raised money to attack it. Morphotonics said it has closed €40M in an extended round that began in 2024 and will go toward scaling production.

The investors are 3M Ventures, Innovation Industries, BOM, Invest-NL, the European Innovation Council Fund, the Dutch family office Ernij Next and the European Investment Bank.

The technique is nanoimprint lithography. A stamp presses a pattern into a light-sensitive coating and leaves an optical structure behind, the same trick used to coat privacy screens for cars. The volume business today, though, is the waveguide: a sliver of glass or plastic that steers light so a picture appears to float in front of the wearer. Morphotonics says its equipment ends up in the Ray-Ban Display, in Even Realities frames and in Magic Leap hardware.

Chief executive Hugo da Silva says the company has grown from roughly 30 staff to 60 in two years and expects to stop hiring somewhere between 70 and 75 people. Its next system, still on the line, is built for an annual output above 6 million waveguides and is scheduled to ship early next year. Hardware accounts for about 90% of revenue. Between 10 and 15 systems are running, and production sits in China, Taiwan, South Korea and the US.

Da Silva also pitched a second market: co-packaged optics for data centres, where light moves data between servers. Morphotonics has shipped nothing there yet and says customers have validated the approach.

Source: TechCrunch