QuantumDiamonds raises €91 million to set the global standard for next-generation chip inspection

QuantumDiamonds raises €91 million to set the global standard for next-generation chip inspection

MUNICH, Germany, July 9, 2026 - QuantumDiamonds (QD), one of Europe’s fastest-growing semiconductor equipment companies, 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 the EU level under the European Chips Act.

“This is a major step in bringing quantum sensing into fabs worldwide,” said Kevin Berghoff, CEO and co-founder of QuantumDiamonds. “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.”

The non-dilutive funding is expected to be jointly provided 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 drew significant participation from Bayern Kapital, alongside QD’s existing investors IQ Capital, Earlybird, First Momentum, UnternehmerTUM Funding for Innovators, Creator Fund, Onsight Ventures, and angel investors.

QD is poised to become the sole startup awarded manufacturing funding under the European Chips Act, created to strengthen Europe’s semiconductor supply chain, the firm joins established industrial players such as GlobalFoundries and Carl Zeiss.

Co-founded in 2022 by Berghoff and Dr. Fleming Bruckmaier (CTO) as a spin-out of the Technical University of Munich, QD is already engaged with nine of the world’s top ten semiconductor manufacturers. The company will use the 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 over the next 12 months.

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’s technology addresses this central challenge in advanced chip manufacturing by leveraging atomic-scale defects in synthetic diamonds to detect magnetic fields with extreme precision — effectively a microscope that can see electricity flowing through chips. Its first commercial system, the QDm.1, enables non-destructive 3D current imaging at the nanoscale, pinpointing the precise location and depth of chip defects.

“We'd been trying to debug this chip for six weeks. You found the defect in under a minute," said a Tier 1 U.S. chip designer working with the QD technology.

QD has built momentum across three regions in quick succession. In March 2026, the company expanded into Asia, establishing a regional hub in Taiwan and appointing industry veteran Peter Lemmens, formerly 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 Asia deployment at Integrated Service Technology (iST) in Hsinchu, Taiwan, at the heart of the world’s most advanced semiconductor cluster.

Later this year, QD expects to open the first operational section of its new €152 million production facility in Munich. The site will manufacture QD’s current and successor systems, giving Europe a commercial and technological lead in a cutting-edge inspection capability.

“Compute has become strategic infrastructure,” said Daria Saharova, Managing Partner at World Fund. “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.”

“The demand for highly complex chips, manufactured in large quantities and with the greatest possible efficiency to meet market needs, will continue to rise in the future as AI applications gain greater market penetration. QuantumDiamonds is bringing quantum sensor technology to a promising growth market and addressing key quality management challenges there. The founding team is highly skilled, already well-connected within the industry, and backed by a strong consortium of investors. This combination makes QuantumDiamonds a technologically and commercially promising investment for us,” says Monika Steger, Managing Director of Bayern Kapital.

Mason Sinclair, Partner at IQ Capital, said: “Since our initial seed investment in late 2023, the pace of technical progress at QD has been exceptional. They’ve executed rapidly, assembled a world-class technical team, and built strong partnerships across the chip ecosystem. The technology is strongly resonating, and we’re proud to continue backing their journey.”

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About QuantumDiamonds

QuantumDiamonds GmbH manufactures semiconductor inspection technology that enables the world’s leading chipmakers to non-destructively analyze their most advanced chips. The company has developed a microscope for electric currents that detects hidden defects, improves production yields, and accelerates development cycles for next-generation packaging technologies. Spun out of the Technical University of Munich in 2022, QuantumDiamonds is building the world’s first production facility for quantum-based semiconductor inspection. The company is based in Munich, Germany. For more information, please visit www.qd-st.com 

About World Fund

World Fund invests at the frontier of a new technology era. The firm backs entrepreneurs rebuilding the trillion-euro markets in Industry, Energy, and Food and Agriculture. World Fund supports them across success-defining stages to turn deep science into outlier companies. The fund has €300M AUM with offices in Berlin, Munich and Amsterdam.