Nearfield Instruments raises $380 million, hits $1.6 billion valuation

Nearfield Instruments secured $380 million in fresh capital at a $1.6 billion valuation, a deal the Dutch company described as its Series D round and the largest deep-tech funding round ever completed in the Netherlands. The financing adds a major private-market win for Europe’s semiconductor sector at a time when the global chip race is being shaped not only by fabrication capacity, but by the tools that determine whether advanced chips can be made reliably at scale.

The Netherlands-based company makes atomic force microscopes and related inspection systems that measure features on chips during manufacturing. Those measurements are taken at several stages in production to verify that fabrication is on track, with the company’s tools able to check structures only a few atoms tall by dragging a probe across the surface. Nearfield also says its AUDIRA platform is the semiconductor industry’s first and only in-line, non-destructive subsurface metrology system, designed to provide nanometer-level measurements of buried features and defects through opaque layers. The company says AUDIRA combines acoustic microscopy with proprietary AFM technology and is aimed at advanced memory and logic devices.

The round was led by Fidelity Management & Research Company, with participation from Temasek, Innovation Industries, M&G, Invest-NL and Walden Catalyst Ventures. Qatar Investment Authority joined as a new investor, while existing backers TNO Ventures and ING also participated. Nearfield co-founder and chief executive Hamed Sadeghian said the money will be used to expand manufacturing and customer-support operations so the company can keep up with demand tied to AI chipmaking. He said Nearfield already has its tools in use by advanced chipmakers and wants to improve productivity, capacity and lead times.

The funding highlights a broader shift in semiconductor investment, where the pressure from AI demand is pushing capital not only into chip designers and fab builders, but also into measurement, inspection and process-control companies that can become bottlenecks of their own. That dynamic has made metrology more strategically important, since yield and precision often decide whether a fabrication line can compete. Nearfield, founded in January 2016 as a spin-off from TNO, has grown quickly since launching AUDIRA on July 10, 2023. It raised €135 million in a Series C round on July 18, 2024, including €10 million from Invest-NL, a comparison that shows how sharply its capital needs and market value have risen in less than two years.