The most expensive machine in semiconductor manufacturing costs over $400 million. It weighs 180 tons, needs its own building, and uses tin droplets blasted by lasers to produce extreme ultraviolet light. If you want to make cutting-edge chips, you buy one from ASML. There's no alternative. Or there wasn't, until a startup in Lund started etching atoms.

AlixLabs just completed its EUR 15 million Series A with a strategic top-up from Stephen Industries, a Finnish investment firm whose chairman, Kustaa Poutiainen, previously built Picosun into a global leader in atomic layer deposition before it was acquired. The connection between depositing atoms and removing them with surgical precision isn't coincidental. It's the whole point.

The company's technology, called Atomic Pitch Splitting (APS), uses atomic-precision etching to split a single coarser pattern into two finer ones. Instead of running multiple expensive lithography cycles or buying another EUV machine, chipmakers could achieve the same resolution with a fraction of the cost and energy. Beta testing with semiconductor customers starts this year. Manufacturing deployment is targeted for 2027.

Making transistors smaller requires making the patterns that define them smaller. The industry's current approach, extreme ultraviolet lithography, works brilliantly but brutally. Each EUV exposure step costs chipmakers time, energy, and capital. When a single chip design needs multiple EUV passes (multi-patterning), the costs compound fast.

AlixLabs attacks this problem at the etching stage, not the exposure stage. APS takes a pattern created by a single, cheaper lithography step and refines it to a finer pitch using atomic layer etching. One exposure becomes two patterns. The math is simple: fewer EUV passes means fewer $400 million machines, lower electricity bills, and faster production cycles.

CEO Jonas Sundqvist describes Poutiainen's involvement as 'especially valuable as we move from development toward broader commercialisation.' That's not just polite investor relations. Picosun's journey from niche Finnish process startup to an acquisition by Applied Materials is precisely the playbook AlixLabs is trying to run.

The Series A came together in two tranches. A EUR 14.1 million first close in November 2025 was led by returning investors Navigare Ventures, Industrifonden, and FORWARD.one, alongside new participants STOAF (a Swedish institutional fund) and Global Brain, a Japanese venture capital firm managing strategic semiconductor-focused funds.

Global Brain's presence opens the Japanese semiconductor market, where TSMC suppliers and equipment makers like Tokyo Electron are actively hunting for process innovations. AlixLabs also recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding with VDL ETG Projects, a Dutch precision equipment maker in the high-tech manufacturing supply chain, for the industrialization of APS.

In February 2026, AlixLabs received notice of patent allowance in Taiwan for a selective etching nanostructures patent. If you know one thing about where advanced chips are made, you know it's Taiwan. TSMC, the world's largest contract chipmaker, is headquartered there. Intel's most advanced process nodes are being co-developed with TSMC. Having IP protection in that jurisdiction isn't a nice-to-have. It's table stakes for commercialization.

The company also secured EU trademark registration for 'Power ALE,' a variant of its etching process, signaling that the product roadmap extends beyond a single technique.

AlixLabs isn't operating in a vacuum. It grew out of research at Lund University and is part of NanoLund, one of Europe's strongest nanoscience research clusters. The same ecosystem produced Solibro (thin-film solar), Acconeer (radar sensors), and Hexatronic (fiber optics). There's a pattern here: deep university research, patient capital, and founders who understand that hardware takes time.

The semiconductor industry spends roughly $200 billion per year on capital equipment. Even a small share of that, captured by a process that reduces the need for the most expensive machines in the world, represents a massive opportunity. AlixLabs still needs to prove that APS works at production scale, in a real fab, under real conditions. But with EUR 15 million, a clear 2026/2027 timeline, and customers already lined up for beta testing, the gap between laboratory promise and industrial reality is closing.