Our investment in Lace Lithography: rewriting the rules of chipmaking

TLDR

• Atomico leads Lace Lithography’s $40M Series A for atom-beam lithography delivering 10x finer chip resolution than today’s best light-based systems.

Key Takeaways

• Lace uses helium atom beams instead of photons, bypassing the diffraction limit that constrains all current EUV and DUV lithography systems.
• Atom-beam lithography achieves resolutions 10x smaller than existing systems at lower cost, energy, and infrastructure complexity than ASML-class machines.
• The core unsolved problem was mask computation, considered intractable; Lace’s proprietary AI algorithm accelerates that computation by over 15 orders of magnitude.
• The $40M Series A is led by Atomico with M12 (Microsoft’s Venture Fund), Linse Capital, SETT, and Nysnø; total funding exceeds $60M in under two years.
• Founders Bodil Holst (atomic beam physics, University of Bergen) and Adrià Salvador Palau (instrumentation engineering and AI) hit milestones ahead of schedule.

Why It Matters

• The most advanced lithography machines today cost over €380M per unit from a single supplier; next-generation systems are projected to exceed €700M, creating a structural bottleneck.
• Lace’s system is designed to drop into existing foundry workflows, reducing the switching cost barrier that typically blocks new semiconductor tooling from adoption.
• Light-based patterning has been the industry’s only approach for 60 years; atom-beam lithography is the first credible alternative with working hardware rather than a roadmap promise.

Atomico · 2026-03-23 · Read the original