Deep Tech Company Closes $17.3M Funding Round: Week in Brief: 11/21/25
PARIS, Nov. 21, 2025 — Hummink, a deep tech company, raised €15 million ($17.3M) in a funding round co-led by KBC Focus Fund, Cap Horn, and Bpifrance to expand deployment of its patented high-precision capillary printing technology, which enables manufacturers to print metals and functional materials with what the company says is record-level accuracy and repair microscopic defects in real time. The technology is complementary to lithography, allowing manufacturers to identify and correct flaws, thereby reducing yield losses and material waste. Hummink expects to double its workforce by 2026 and double its revenue by year-end, driven by strong demand for its printing modules and proprietary conductive inks. The latest funding round will accelerate the development of Hummink’s industrial printing module and prepare the technology for full integration inside semiconductor and display fabs.
Hummink’s founders, Pascal Boncenne (Left) and Amin M'Barki. Courtesy of Hummink.
HSINCHU, Taiwan — GLOBAL UNICHIP CORP. (GUC), an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) company, and Ayar Labs partnered to integrate co-packaged optics into GUC’s advanced ASIC design services. This collaboration will pave the way for high-bandwidth, low-latency, power-efficient optical interconnects in next-generation AI, high-performance compute, and networking applications where electrical signaling is reaching its limits. The multi-chip package design replaces traditional electrical interconnects with Ayar Labs’ optical engines attached directly to the organic substrate. This architecture enables >100 Tbps full-duplex optical interface from the processor package, more than an order of magnitude improvement over current processors.
Volker Herbig, vice president for microsystems at X-FAB (Left), and professor Harald Kuhn, Fraunhofer, in front of the Fraunhofer Institute in Chemnitz, Germany. Courtesy of X-FAB.
ERFURT, Germany — The Fraunhofer Institute for Electronic Nano Systems ENAS and X-FAB are collaborating under a cooperation model to integrate research, development, manufacturing, and commercialization to accelerate the transition of microtechnology innovations into industrial-scale production. The collaborators will develop wafer bonding techniques for wafer-level packaging and heterogeneous integration for future applications in sensing, communication, and medical technology. The cooperation model includes staff exchanges, joint research, funding projects, participation in conferences, and market development.
UbiQD CEO Hunter McDaniel (left), and newly appointed CFO Tony Beams. Courtesy of UbiQD.
LOS ALAMOS, N.M. — UbiQD, a quantum dot company, announced a $6 million debt financing agreement with Silicon Valley Bank to support infrastructure investments, including facility upgrades and specialized manufacturing equipment, supporting UbiQD's scale-up in response to commercial demand. The $6 million term loan reflects a broader financial upgrade at UbiQD following a $20 million series B funding round and the signing of a long-term supply agreement with First Solar.
BRUSSELS — The European Innovation Commission (EIC) announced a group of companies to receive scale-up investments through the EIC Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform Scale Up call. Proposed to receive a combined €171 million ($197M) of equity investments, they will now go forward to the EIC Fund for investment decisions. Each company will receive between €10 million and €30 million to leverage private co-investment and achieve financing rounds of €50 million to €150 million or more. Eight companies were chosen for investment decisions by the EIC Fund. Selected companies include Focused Energy, Marvel Fusion, Nexwafe, Quandela and Smart Photonics.
ROTTERDAM, Netherlands — Nearfield Instruments announced a strategic development project with imec to accelerate innovation in semiconductor metrology. Nearfield Instruments will deploy its flagship system, QUADRA, at imec’s advanced R&D facility in Leuven, Belgium. The collaboration will develop metrology solutions to address critical challenges across the semiconductor manufacturing value chain, including high-numerical-aperture extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) lithography metrology, 3D profiling of advanced logic devices, and 3D heterogeneous integration metrology.
WHITE RIVER JUNCTION, Vt. — QUEL Imaging, a biomedical imaging company, and the Institut National d'Optique (INO), Canada’s optical and photonics industrial innovation center, jointly announced the transfer of specialized assets to QUEL Imaging. The agreement includes INO's time-of-flight optical characterization equipment, validation phantoms, long-term stability data, and detailed documentation of material properties. According to the company, the acquisition strengthens QUEL Imaging's position as the only North American supplier of tissue-equivalent optical phantoms and the only biomedically focused organization measuring optical properties continuously from the UV through the SWIR.
TOKYO — NTT and OptQC signed a collaboration agreement to build a 1 million-qubit quantum optical computer. Under the agreement, NTT will provide quantum error correction and optical communication technologies to OptQC’s quantum computing platform to commercialize practical, scalable, and reliable optical quantum computers. The optical quantum computer under development has set a target goal of 2030 to achieve scalability to the 1 million-qubit scale. It will combine NTT's optical communications and quantum error correction technologies with OptQC's optical quantum computer development technologies.
TORONTO — Kepler Communications, a satellite telecommunications provider, plans to launch 10 300-kg class satellites for its optical data relay network aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The launch is part of Kepler’s next-generation operational constellation, which is designed to provide real-time connectivity, advanced on-orbit compute, and hosted payload services for government and commercial customers. Each satellite in the network is equipped with a minimum of four optical terminals, enabling high-throughput, low-latency laser links between space, air, and ground assets. The system is designed to work with the U.S. Space Development Agency’s optical communications standards for connectivity in government and commercial space architectures. government and commercial space architectures.
ST. LOUIS — Accton/Edgecore Networks, a provider of open infrastructure solutions, 1Finity, a global provider of communications networks, and Liqid, a software-defined composable infrastructure company, announced a strategic collaboration to develop and deliver a data center solution that enables seamless all-photonic network connectivity across long distances from several km to several hundred km. The solution is designed to maintain high transmission rates, low latency, and zero throughput degradation for both RDMA and NVMe-oF protocols. 1Finity is providing its optical networking platform, and Liqid is bringing its PCIe Gen5-based software-defined composable infrastructure solution.
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