Morphotonics, a Netherlands-based specialist in nanoimprint lithography (NIL), has secured a €40 million funding round to scale its display technologies and break into the data center optics space.
What Morphotonics Does and Why It Matters
Nanoimprint lithography involves using a mold or “stamp” to press patterns into photosensitive materials. It’s a method increasingly important for creating displays found in AR or smart glasses, and Morphotonics has spent the past 12 years refining this under-the-radar. The company’s technology supports waveguides—thin strips of glass or plastic that direct light so images appear overlayed in a wearer’s field of view—as used in devices like Meta’s Ray-Ban Display, Magic Leap, and Even Reality. The rise in demand for these wearable displays has made Morphotonics’ tools more sought after.
Funding, Growth & Market Expansion
This latest financing is part of a multi-stage round that’s been developing since 2024. Investors include 3M Ventures; Innovation Industries; BOM; Invest-NL; the European Innovation Council (EIC) Fund; Ernij Next; and the European Investment Bank (EIB). The new capital will allow Morphotonics to scale up production facilities, especially to serve smart glasses manufacturers and optics makers. It’ll also fund a push into co-packaged optics technology for data centers. Though no systems in that domain have shipped yet, such components have passed customer validation.
When the current CEO, Hugo Da Silva, joined in September 2024, Morphotonics employed about 30 people. Since then it has doubled its headcount—to around 60—and expects this to settle around 70-75. Its next machine, under construction and set to begin shipping early next year, is designed to manufacture over six million waveguides per year. Manufacturing is heavily Asia-centric, with facilities or local teams in China, Taiwan, South Korea, and the U.S.
Business Model & Revenue Trajectory
Morphotonics derives roughly 90% of revenue from hardware sales, with licensing of its manufacturing process making up the remainder. Currently it has deployed ten to fifteen systems globally, but the plan is to scale that up to around 50 deployments over the next two to three years—both to increase revenue and expand its service footprint.
China already shows signs of heating up: demand for smart glasses in that country doubled during the first eight months of this year. By 2030, AR displays are projected to ship about 12.2 million units worldwide. As display manufacturers grow, they increasingly need equipment like what Morphotonics offers to mass-produce waveguides.
Morphotonics also intends to enter the co-packaged optics space in data center networks—where optical integrated circuits transport data using light instead of electricity—tying its NIL tools to this emerging high-speed communications infrastructure.
What this means: Morphotonics is transitioning from niche display supply into foundational components for next-gen optics. It’s betting that AR wearable demand and data center upgrades will converge, and NIL can serve both. How quickly the company can meet production scale, navigate supply chains (especially across Asia), and penetrate the heavily cost-sensitive data center market will determine its impact. With €40 million in fresh capital, Morphotonics is aiming to prove NIL is ready for mainstream optics—not just smart glasses, but also the backbone of photonic networks.
