Dutch Foundry SMART Photonics Secures $111M in Financing

SMART Photonics, a foundry for photonic integrated circuits (PIC), has secured an additional round of funding of €100 million ($111 million) from a group of Dutch industry and finance investors. The scale-up company, which started as a spinoff of the Technical University of Eindhoven, said it will use the funding to extend its manufacturing capabilities and accelerate the development of its PIC technology platforms and process design kits.

SMART Photonics, a foundry for photonic integrated circuits (PIC), has secured an additional round of funding of €100 million to extend its manufacturing capabilities and accelerate the development of its PIC technology platforms and process design kits. Courtesy of SMART Photonics.

News of the funding comes after SMART Photonics was announced as a partner on the European Union-funded photonixFAB initiative in June. The photonixFAB project will provide low entry access to ultralow-loss silicon nitride- and silicon-based photonics platforms with indium phosphide heterogenous integration capabilities developed by SMART Photonics. The effort aims to boost innovation within the European silicon photonics industry and increase sovereignty in Europe’s semiconductor and photonics industries.

Among the group of new lenders are ASML, NXP, and VDL Groep, as well as financial institutions ING and BOP Impact Ventures and Deep Tech Fund, which is part of Invest-NL and partly funded by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy. Previous investors, including Innovation Industries, BOM, PhotonDelta, and KPN Ventures, also joined in the funding round. The government of the Netherlands will provide €60 million in public funding as part of the approved National Growth Fund project PhotonDelta as previously announced. PhotonDelta itself secured more than €1 billion in public and private investment to support semiconductor development and manufacturing in the Netherlands last year.