Lace Lithography, a Bergen-based chipmaking equipment startup, has raised €34.5 million ($40 million) in a Series A round to enable the next 100 years of chip production.
The round was led by Atomico, alongside M12 (Microsoft’s Venture Fund), Linse Capital, SETT, and Nysnø, with participation from existing investors Vsquared Ventures, Future Ventures, and Runa Capital. Since its founding two years ago, the company has secured over €51.7 million ($60 million) in total funding, including this round.
“As the world races toward more advanced computing, traditional lithography can no longer keep up. Lace offers a fundamentally new path forward. Our goal is not to replace the foundry workflow, but to supercharge and augment it,” said Dr Bodil Holst, CEO and co-founder of Lace Lithography.
Founded in 2023 by Dr Holst and Adrià Salvador Palau, Lace develops BEUV (Beyond-EUV) atom lithography systems to enable the quantum future on an industrial scale. By using atoms instead of light, it claims to extend Moore’s Law a decade beyond current tech.
Explaining the problem the company is solving, Atomico mentioned in a blog post, “Chips run the world. And making them keeps getting harder. The most advanced lithography machines today cost upwards of €380 million per unit, with the next generation expected to exceed €700 million. They are extraordinarily complex, energy intensive, and sourced from a single supplier. The result is a manufacturing bottleneck at the heart of the global economy, arriving at exactly the moment AI is driving an unprecedented surge in demand for compute. The industry has known this is coming, but previously nobody has had a credible answer.”
Lace tackles this issue by entirely removing light. The company is developing a new generation of lithography technology for microchip production and is working on a solution that uses metastable helium atoms instead of light to pattern semiconductor wafers.
Instead of photons, the company uses a beam of helium atoms to pattern features on silicon. Atoms do not have a diffraction limit like photons, enabling atom-beam lithography to reach resolutions 10 times smaller than current top systems, while using less cost, energy, and complexity. The system integrates smoothly into existing foundry workflows with minimal infrastructure modifications.
“The remaining hard problem was mask design: the mathematics involved were considered effectively intractable. Lace solved it with a proprietary AI-driven algorithm that accelerates the computation by over 15 orders of magnitude. This is not an incremental improvement. It is a category shift,” mentioned Atomico.
“By using atom-beam lithography, the company opens a fundamentally new path for chip manufacturing, one that could dramatically extend scaling while reducing system complexity and energy consumption by orders of magnitude. Atoms behave like waves, but with much shorter wavelengths, enabling significantly finer structures, more powerful chips, and radically lower energy consumption,” Vsquared Ventures mentioned in a LinkedIn post.
The company operates out of Norway, Spain, the UK, and the Netherlands.
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2026/03/norways-lace-lithography-lands-e34-5-million-to-extend-moores-law-by-replacing-light-with-atoms/
