Somewhere in a lab in Lund, Sweden, engineers are removing material from silicon wafers one atomic layer at a time. Not a metaphor. Literally one layer of atoms. The precision involved is almost absurd. And it might be exactly what the semiconductor industry needs to keep making chips smaller, faster, and more power-efficient.

AlixLabs has completed its EUR 15 million Series A, closing it out with a strategic investment from Stephen Industries, a Finnish investment company led by Kustaa Poutiainen. The bulk of the round, EUR 14.1 million, was announced in November 2025 with Global Brain and key institutional investors. The Stephen Industries top-up, finalized in Q1 2026, adds more than capital. It adds a very specific kind of expertise.

Kustaa Poutiainen isn't just any investor. He played a central role in the growth of Picosun, a Finnish company that commercialized Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD) and turned it into a global semiconductor manufacturing standard. Picosun went from a Nordic niche player to a technology that every major chipmaker on earth uses today. Poutiainen knows what it takes to scale a process technology from lab demonstrations to production tools that run 24/7 in billion-dollar fabs.

ALD deposits material one atomic layer at a time. ALE, what AlixLabs does, removes material one atomic layer at a time. They're complementary processes, two sides of the same atomic-scale coin. If ALD is the brush that paints circuits onto silicon, ALE is the scalpel that carves them into shape. And just as ALD went from academic curiosity to industrial necessity, many in the semiconductor world believe ALE is on the same trajectory.

AlixLabs' flagship technology is called APS, or Atomic Pitch Splitting. To understand why it matters, you need to know that chipmakers are running into a fundamental problem: the patterns they need to etch into silicon are smaller than the wavelength of light used to create them. It's like trying to paint a miniature with a brush that's too wide. Current solutions involve multiple exposures and increasingly complex lithography steps, each adding cost and time. AlixLabs claims APS can achieve the same or better results with fewer steps and lower cost.

"Stephen Industries brings deep industrial expertise and a proven ability to scale companies in adjacent technology domains," said Jonas Sundqvist, CEO of AlixLabs. "Kustaa's experience with Picosun is especially valuable as we move from development toward broader commercialization of our APS platform." That's a polished CEO quote, but the underlying point is real: AlixLabs is transitioning from proving the technology works to convincing semiconductor manufacturers to adopt it in production.

Lund isn't the first city you think of when someone says "semiconductor." But the southern Swedish university town has quietly built a cluster of deeptech companies rooted in the physics and engineering departments of Lund University. The city's synchrotron radiation facility, MAX IV, and the European Spallation Source give researchers access to some of the most powerful analytical tools in the world. That's the kind of infrastructure that spawns companies like AlixLabs.

Founded in 2019, AlixLabs grew out of research that recognized Atomic Layer Etching could solve real manufacturing problems if it could be made reliable and scalable. That's a big "if" in the semiconductor world, where precision requirements are measured in fractions of nanometers and production tools need to run continuously for months without maintenance.

Earlier in April, AlixLabs announced a memorandum of understanding with VDL ETG Projects for the industrialization of its APS patterning technology. VDL is a Dutch precision engineering group that builds tools for the semiconductor industry, including equipment for ASML. When a company in the ASML supply chain starts working with you on industrialization, you've crossed an important threshold. You're no longer just a lab. You're a prospective supplier.

The semiconductor equipment market is famously difficult to enter. The existing players, ASML, Applied Materials, Lam Research, Tokyo Electron, have decades of relationships with chipmakers and install bases that create enormous switching costs. But they also have blind spots. New process technologies like ALE often emerge from smaller, more nimble companies that can take risks the incumbents won't.

The European Chips Act has poured billions into semiconductor manufacturing and R&D, with the explicit goal of increasing Europe's share of global chip production from around 10% to 20% by 2030. For companies like AlixLabs, that policy creates both funding opportunities and a more favorable environment for European semiconductor innovation.

But policy alone doesn't build production tools. AlixLabs needs to demonstrate that APS works reliably at the nanometer scales that chipmakers demand, integrate smoothly into existing fab workflows, and deliver the cost savings the company promises. Those are hard engineering problems that take years to solve, and the EUR 15 million in Series A funding is a bridge to proving them, not the finish line.

Poutiainen put it simply: "Having seen firsthand how ALD evolved from a niche innovation to a critical industry standard, I see strong parallels with ALE. AlixLabs has the potential to follow a similar trajectory."

Similar trajectory. Similar timeframe? Probably not. ALD took decades to become ubiquitous. But the semiconductor industry is moving faster now than it was thirty years ago, and the demand for new process technologies is more urgent. If AlixLabs can deliver on its technical promises, the market is ready. If.