QuantumDiamonds (QD) has closed a €91 million funding round to scale production of its quantum-based semiconductor inspection technology, the Munich company announced July 9. The raise combines a €15 million equity round led by World Fund with €76 million in non-dilutive funding approved under the European Chips Act, expected to be jointly provided by Germany's Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy and the Free State of Bavaria.
The company's first commercial product, the QDm.1, uses atomic-scale defects in synthetic diamonds to detect magnetic fields with extreme precision, effectively functioning as a microscope that images electricity flowing through a chip. What's new here is depth resolution: the system provides non-destructive 3D current imaging at the nanoscale, pinpointing the precise location and depth of buried defects in complex 3D chip architectures. Conventional tools struggle to see those defects, and industry analysis cited by QD puts the value of a single percentage point improvement in yield at millions of dollars per week for a high-volume device. A Tier 1 U.S. chip designer working with the system described finding a defect in under a minute after six weeks of failed attempts.
Co-founded in 2022 as a Technical University of Munich spin-out, QD already works with nine of the world's top ten semiconductor manufacturers. Live deployments are running at Eurofins EAG Laboratories in Sunnyvale, California, and at Integrated Service Technology (iST) in Hsinchu, Taiwan. Both installations are at semiconductor test and characterization labs rather than production fabs. The equity round drew participation from Bayern Kapital alongside existing investors IQ Capital, Earlybird, First Momentum, UnternehmerTUM Funding for Innovators, Creator Fund, and Onsight Ventures.
QD says it is positioned to be the sole startup awarded manufacturing funding under the European Chips Act, joining larger industrial companies such as GlobalFoundries and Carl Zeiss in receiving the support. A new €152 million production facility in Munich, expected to open its first operational section later this year, will manufacture both current and successor systems. The company employs 70 people and plans to more than double its engineering headcount in the next 12 months, with wafer-level high-throughput fab inspection cited as the next development target.
