Morphotonics raises €40M to expand its display tech into data centers
- ID
- 28092
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 22 Sep 2026, 2:00 PM
- Fetched
- 24 Sep 2026, 9:25 PM
- Provider
- TechCrunch Startups
- Category
- startup
- Original URL
- https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/21/morphotonics-raises-e40m-to-expand-its-display-tech-into-data-centers/
- Source URL
- https://techcrunch.com/category/startups/feed/
Summary
- Score
- 3.0
- Created
- 24 Sep 2026, 9:26 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- developerssaas_founders
What happened
Dutch company Morphotonics raised €40M to scale production of nanoimprint lithography (NIL) equipment, a process it has spent 12 years developing for manufacturing optical displays, and to push into a new market: optical components for data centers. The round was backed by 3M Ventures, Innovation Industries, BOM, Invest-NL, the European Innovation Council Fund, Ernij Next, and the European Investment Bank. Its NIL stamps are used to make waveguides for smart glasses including the Meta Ray-Ban Display, Even Reality, and Magic Leap, and the company says it draws on ASML's supply chain and many of the same vendors.
Why it matters
This is a European deep-tech hardware funding round, not a tool or platform you can adopt — nothing in your stack or roadmap changes because of it. The only usable numbers for builders are demand signals on the application side: China's smart glasses sales doubled in the first eight months of the year, and IDC expects shipments of display-equipped smart glasses to reach 12.2 million by 2030. If you build for AR/display glasses, that is a small but growing install base to plan around; if you don't, skip this item.
Discussion angle
Display glasses are projected at only 12.2 million units by 2030 — is that a market worth building an app layer for now, or is the real near-term money still in the optics and waveguide supply chain that Malaysia's semiconductor and EMS ecosystem already feeds?