QuantumDiamonds gets EU backing to challenge chip giants

Munich-based QuantumDiamonds has been granted €76 million in non-dilutive funding — funding that doesn’t require giving up equity — from Germany’s federal economy ministry and the state of Bavaria, with approval from the European Commission. The money is part of a $178 million investment plan the company had already announced, and will fund a new Munich facility for producing its semiconductor testing equipment. Separately, QuantumDiamonds raised a €15 million equity round led by World Fund.

The company’s synthetic diamonds use quantum sensing to detect the magnetic fields created as electricity moves through a chip, spotting defects across every layer without destroying the chip. QuantumDiamonds claims it can compress a defect detection process that usually takes weeks into a two-minute inspection, and says this can help Taiwan-based Foundries and Korea’s Memory Makers save hundreds of millions of dollars. CEO Kevin Berghoff said the hardware is typically paid back entirely within a couple of months. As he put it, “They couldn’t care less about it being quantum” — customers care only about the results.

Large competitors, including U.S.-based inspection companies with a 100 billion market capitalization, will likely adapt at some point, according to Berghoff, though he noted no U.S. or Asian company has yet shipped comparable tools. QuantumDiamonds is moving from lab-based sample testing — where it checks roughly one in a million chips — toward high-throughput systems capable of full quality control inside the fab (the semiconductor manufacturing plant) itself. Pricing differs sharply between the two:

• Lab tools: single-digit millions of dollars
• High-throughput systems: up to $10 to $15 million, still far below the maybe $400 million cost of an ASML machine

Berghoff said ASML, the Dutch chipmaking machine manufacturer, might buy QuantumDiamonds at some point, since ASML also wants to expand into inspection.

QuantumDiamonds, a spinout from the Technical University of Munich (TUM), has already completed commercial deployments in Taiwan and the U.S., including installing a system at Eurofins EAG Laboratories in Sunnyvale, California. Its team of 70 people is based mostly in Munich, and Berghoff and co-founder and CTO Fleming Bruckmaier plan to double the engineering team over the next 12 months, drawing on local quantum and semiconductor talent to support the company’s overseas push.

Why it matters

As chipmakers add more layers to chips to boost computing power, fast, non-destructive inspection is becoming a critical bottleneck for global chip supply chains — and QuantumDiamonds is betting Europe can build the tools to solve it.