QuantumDiamonds Closes €91M for Europe’s First Quantum Chip-Test Plant

Munich semiconductor sensor maker QuantumDiamonds closed a €91 million funding round this week, combining €15 million in private equity led by climatetech investor World Fund with €76 million in non-dilutive state aid approved by the European Commission. The grant was cleared on 23 June 2026 under Article 107(3)(c) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU, the regulator’s fourteenth chip-related state aid decision of the current cycle. The package pairs a private cheque for QuantumDiamonds, founded in 2022, with a public subsidy for the Munich factory the company is about to build.

QuantumDiamonds sells inspection tools based on defects in synthetic diamonds that image how electricity flows inside advanced chips, a market the company frames as a $104 billion equipment segment. The close arrived three weeks after the European Commission released Chips Act 2.0, its next attempt to narrow Europe’s equipment gap with the United States and Asia.

A €91M Round Split Between Private Capital and EU Backing

On 8 July 2026 QuantumDiamonds announced the close of a €91 million financing, and the structure is unusual for a chip startup at this scale. Of the total, only €15 million is equity, with the remainder a direct grant from the German federal government and the Free State of Bavaria that does not dilute existing investors. World Fund, a new investor, led the equity tranche.

• World Fund: lead investor, new to the cap table
• Bayern Kapital: new entrant, German VC
• IQ Capital: existing investor, co-led the 2023 seed
• Earlybird: existing investor, co-led the 2023 seed
• First Momentum, UnternehmerTUM, Creator Fund, Onsight Ventures: existing backers
• Angel investors: alongside the institutional round

The combined structure preserves QuantumDiamonds’ precise valuation, which the company declined to disclose. CEO and co-founder Kevin Berghoff told media the round moved quickly because QuantumDiamonds could show customer demand up front. The point runs through the structure: a private round small enough to keep dilution modest, paired with a grant large enough to bankroll a multi-year build-out that venture capital alone would have hesitated to underwrite. World Fund managing partner Daria Saharova named the bet in a written statement, framing QuantumDiamonds as a candidate to become Europe’s next ASML.

What the EU Approved, and the Strings Attached

The Commission cleared €76 million in aid under Article 107(3)(c) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU, the legal hook reserved for projects with a proven funding gap. The grant supports QuantumDiamonds’ IPF-ATEST project, which the company describes as the world’s first production facility for chip-testing systems based on quantum sensing. the European Commission’s formal €76M state aid approval ties the aid to high-resolution, 3D testing of advanced chips without destroying them.

The project is “first-of-a-kind in Europe,” in the Commission’s own words, and the regulator tied that claim to a specific test of public interest. Without public support, the Commission found, QuantumDiamonds would not have invested in Europe at this scale. The Commission concluded that without the grant, QuantumDiamonds would have built the plant outside Europe, in the United States or Asia, where most quantum-sensor intellectual property already sits. The decision brought the cumulative tally of chip-related aid approved under Article 107(3)(c) to around €14.2 billion across fourteen member-state cases.

QuantumDiamonds accepted five obligations in exchange for the public money, designed to make the new plant useful beyond its own products. Here is what the company signed up to:

• Broader impact on EU chip value chain: support security of supply and grow the qualified workforce
• University and research collaboration: strengthen ties with academic and research partners
• Priority supply in a shortage: fulfil orders first if Europe runs short
• SME and startup access: make part of the facility available to early-stage companies, startups, and academic labs
• Profit-sharing with Germany: hand back profits beyond the Commission’s current expectations

Why a Climatetech Fund Led the Equity Round

World Fund’s appearance is itself part of the story. The Berlin-based firm styles itself as a climatetech investor; semiconductor inspection tooling is not its usual patch. Saharova’s case for joining rested on a single claim: AI compute has become strategic infrastructure, and Europe imports the bulk of it.

Compute has become strategic infrastructure. Europe uses around 20% of the world’s semiconductors while producing only 10%, and that gap is exactly where our strategic power leaks away. QD can become Europe’s next ASML: a first-of-a-kind technology, built and scaled here, in a $104 billion equipment market that the entire AI economy depends on. Backing companies like QD is how Europe stops buying its technological future from others and starts building the leverage to shape its own.

Daria Saharova, managing partner at World Fund, released the statement on 8 July 2026 with the round close. Berghoff, in his own statement, framed the round as a step toward putting quantum sensing into fabs worldwide. He added that Europe’s role in the next chip era would be a defining one. Two investors, same template: QuantumDiamonds as Europe’s next ASML, with public policy acting as the underwriting layer.

How Diamond Defects See Current Inside a Chip

QuantumDiamonds was founded in November 2022 by Berghoff and Dr. Fleming Bruckmaier as a spin-out of the Technical University of Munich. QuantumDiamonds’ own description of its founding team sets out the bench: Berghoff left McKinsey’s Advanced Electronics practice to co-found the startup; Bruckmaier built one of Europe’s leading quantum sensing labs at TU Munich’s Bucher Lab during his PhD there.

QD’s tools measure the current flow beneath a chip’s surface, which is why chipmakers care. Conventional inspection uses optical or electron-beam microscopes; as chips stack into 2.5D and 3D packages, those layers hide defects from surface inspection. QuantumDiamonds’ solution uses nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centres in synthetic diamonds to detect the magnetic fields that electric current produces as it moves through those layers. The output is a non-destructive, nanoscale, 3D image of where current is flowing and where it is not.

Berghoff has pitched the tool economically as well as technically. A defect-detection cycle that once ran for weeks, he has said, can be cut down to a two-minute inspection that does not stop the production line. The savings stack: a single percentage point of yield improvement on a high-volume device is worth millions of dollars a week, per the company’s industry-source framing.

Three numbers frame the size of the opportunity the company is chasing. They point at the customer base, the addressable market, and the savings the tool already drives.

• 9 of 10 of the world’s top semiconductor manufacturers are currently engaged with QuantumDiamonds (per the company)
• $104 billion is the addressable chip-equipment market World Fund cites
• 1 percentage point of yield on a high-volume device is worth millions of dollars a week, per the company’s industry-source framing

Where the Money Lands and Where the Tools Already Are

The cash goes to a Munich facility the company announced in December 2025, when Berghoff described a €152 million investment plan to build what he called the world’s first production facility for chip-testing systems based on quantum sensing. Berghoff’s December 2025 plan announcement set out the scope: quantum-grade diamond substrate production, cleanroom integration of QDM inspection systems, joint labs with semiconductor partners, and inline process control for fabs. The latest round, including the EU grant, is what is bankrolling the first operational section, which QD expects to open later this year.

The build-out has been a four-year arc. QuantumDiamonds’ footprint already spans Munich, Hsinchu, and Sunnyvale.

1. November 2022. Spun out from the Technical University of Munich, with co-founders Kevin Berghoff and Fleming Bruckmaier.
2. December 2023. €7M seed round led by IQ Capital and Earlybird, with EU and Bavarian backing.
3. December 2025. Announced a €152M plan to build a Munich production facility.
4. March 2026. Opened a Taiwan regional hub; Peter Lemmens (ex-IMS Nanofabrication, ex-imec) appointed MD Asia.
5. April 2026. QDm.1 systems installed at iST in Hsinchu, Taiwan, and at Eurofins EAG Laboratories in Sunnyvale, California.
6. 23 June 2026. European Commission cleared €76M in state aid for QuantumDiamonds’ IPF-ATEST facility.
7. 8 July 2026. Closed the €91M round, combining €15M equity led by World Fund and the €76M EU-backed grant.

The deployment footprint is already operational, even if the Munich plant is not. The QDm.1 system has been installed at Eurofins EAG Laboratories in Sunnyvale, California, marking the first North American installation of a commercial quantum diamond microscopy system. The same hardware is now running at iST in Hsinchu, Taiwan, inside the cluster that builds the most advanced chips on the planet. QuantumDiamonds currently employs 70 people, the bulk of them in Munich, and plans to more than double its engineering team over the next twelve months. Earlier coverage of the same Munich facility plan tracked the build-out when it was first sketched in late 2025.

Why the EU Approval Lands Now

The Commission’s approval arrived within twenty days of a separate Brussels event that frames it: the 3 June 2026 release of the Chips Act 2.0 proposal, the EU’s second attempt to widen the policy frame for chips, cloud, and AI. Chips Act 2.0 layers new obligations on top of the original 2023 Act, with a sharper focus on cutting strategic dependencies. The QuantumDiamonds grant, the first state aid decision under the new frame, sits at the head of a queue of projects the Commission now expects to clear.

The grant sits inside an arsenal the Commission has been quietly assembling. Cumulative aid approved across the fourteen Article 107(3)(c) decisions now reaches around €14.2 billion, spread across multiple Member States and technologies.

QuantumDiamonds is poised to be the only startup in that portfolio, joining industrial incumbents the Commission already names, including GlobalFoundries and Carl Zeiss.

The next test is whether QD can move from sample-based tools in client labs to full-throughput systems on production lines. Berghoff told media the high-throughput version could carry a $10 to $15 million price tag and could enable 100 percent inline quality control on the fab floor. QD expects the first operational section of the Munich plant to come online later this year, with serial production ramping up.