Lace raises $40M to replace chip-making light with helium atoms

Lace Lithography, founded by a University of Bergen physicist, uses a beam the width of a single hydrogen atom to etch chip features up to ten times smaller than what current extreme ultraviolet lithography can achieve. Atomico led the Series A, with Microsoft’s M12 also participating.

The chip industry’s most valuable piece of equipment is a machine most people have never heard of. ASML’s extreme ultraviolet lithography system, the tool used to etch the world’s most advanced chips, uses light with a wavelength of 13.5 nanometres to draw the circuits that underpin modern AI hardware.

A single machine costs upwards of $350 million. There is no meaningful alternative, and ASML has a near-monopoly on the most advanced systems. A Norwegian startup called Lace is raising $40 million on the belief that it has found one.

Lace, headquartered in Bergen and founded in July 2023 by physicist Bodil Holst and her former PhD student Adria Salvador Palau, uses a beam of helium atoms rather than light to etch chip patterns.

The beam is approximately 0.1 nanometres wide, roughly the width of a single hydrogen atom, and about 135 times finer than ASML’s EUV light. The practical implication, if the technology can be made to work at manufacturing scale, is chip features up to ten times smaller than what current lithography allows: transistors and other structures at what Holst describes as “ultimately atomic resolution.”

The $40 million Series A was led by Atomico, the European venture firm, with participation from Microsoft’s venture arm M12, Linse Capital, Nysnø, a Norwegian state climate investment company, and the Spanish Society for Technological Transformation.

The company has already developed prototype systems and is targeting a test tool in a pilot chip fabrication plant, or fab, around 2029. It presented research findings at a scientific lithography summit in February 2026.

Bodil Holst’s background is unusual for a startup founder in this space. She is a Danish-Norwegian physicist who joined the University of Bergen in 2007 and built her research career around nanoscale imaging, molecular-beam lithography, and 2D materials. She holds an affiliated professorship there while serving as CEO.

Lace’s CTO, Adria Salvador Palau, completed his PhD at Bergen and now operates from Barcelona. The company’s pre-Series A investors included the European Innovation Council and Innovasjon Norge, Norway’s national innovation agency.

The timing is as deliberate as the technology. Governments and investors are pouring money into semiconductor supply chain diversification, driven by geopolitical exposure and AI demand.

Lace enters a market in which ASML’s position is structurally dominant but politically sensitive: the Netherlands’ export controls on EUV machines to China have turned chip lithography into a flashpoint in the broader technology competition between the United States and China.

A credible alternative to EUV, even one a decade from commercial deployment, carries strategic value well beyond its near-term revenue potential. That the Series A includes both a European VC, a Norwegian state fund, and a Spanish government-affiliated investor suggests Lace is being backed as much for its geopolitical optionality as for its commercial trajectory.