Dutch Tech Firm Secures Forty Million Euros to Mass-Produce Smart Glasses Technology
Veldhoven, Tuesday 22 September 2026
Morphotonics has secured over €40 million to mass-produce optical components for AI glasses, tackling a major manufacturing bottleneck after tripling its revenue last year.
Resolving the Optical Scaling Bottleneck
The Veldhoven-based deeptech firm Morphotonics has closed a Series B funding round exceeding €40 million to address one of the most critical hurdles in the augmented reality (AR) and smart glasses market: high-volume waveguide manufacturing [1][3]. Waveguides, which project digital images into a wearer’s field of vision, are essential for products like Meta’s Ray-Ban Display, yet they remain notoriously difficult and expensive to produce at consumer-electronics scale [2]. By combining wafer-level precision with large-area scalability, Morphotonics’ proprietary roll-to-plate nanoimprint lithography (NIL) technology presses nano- and microscopic patterns into liquid resin, which is then hardened by UV light to deliver semiconductor-quality results at display scale [2][3]. This process effectively bypasses traditional production bottlenecks [1][3].
A High-Impact Consortium of Global Investors
This funding round, which represents an extension of a process initiated in 2024, was led by Invest-NL and strongly supported by the European Investment Bank (EIB), which signed a €20 million convertible loan agreement with the firm [1][5]. Returning investors 3M Ventures, Innovation Industries, and Brabantse Ontwikkelings Maatschappij (BOM) increased their commitments, alongside new participation from the European Innovation Council (EIC) Fund and Ernij Next [3][5]. Johan Stins, Senior Investment Manager at Invest-NL, noted that Morphotonics is solving a clear industrial challenge by enabling the manufacturing of increasingly complex optical components at the scale and cost required by consumer markets [3]. The capital injection will be used to scale up its Cypris platform, advance product development, and expand global support infrastructure [3][6].
Rapid Growth and Ambitious Deployment Targets
Morphotonics has demonstrated strong commercial momentum, tripling its revenue in 2025 compared to 2024 [3][4]. To support this rapid commercialisation, the company has doubled its headcount from approximately 30 staff members in September 2024—when CEO Hugo da Silva joined—to 60 employees as of September 2026, representing a growth rate of 100% [1]. The firm plans to further stabilise its total headcount at 70 to 75 employees as part of its ongoing recruitment efforts [1]. Currently, the company has deployed between 10 and 15 systems globally, with approximately 90% of its revenue derived from hardware sales [1]. However, Morphotonics aims to deploy 50 systems worldwide within the next two to three years (by September 2028 to September 2029) to significantly increase its service-based revenue streams [1].
Future-Proofing Data Centres and Wearable Markets
Beyond smart eyewear, Morphotonics is strategically expanding its roll-to-plate technology into co-packaged optics (CPO) for next-generation AI data centres using Photonic Integrated Circuits [1][2]. While no machines have been shipped for this sector yet, the technology has already been validated by customers to deliver lower energy consumption and higher performance [1][2]. This expansion aligns with massive projected growth in the spatial computing and wearables markets; Counterpoint Research forecasts that consumer spending on wearable devices will exceed $1 trillion between 2026 and 2032, with smart eyewear alone generating $44 billion annually by 2032 [3][6]. To capture this demand, Morphotonics is currently constructing a new high-capacity manufacturing machine designed to produce over 6 million waveguides per year, with shipping projected to commence in early 2027 [1].