Chiral closes €10 million Seed round
Chiral, a Swiss nanotechnology startup developing manufacturing tools for next-generation semiconductors and quantum hardware, has raised a €10 million ($12 million) Seed financing round to scale wafer-level production of post-silicon chips based on nanomaterials.
The round was led by Crane Venture Partners, with participation from Quantonation, HCVC, and Founderful, alongside public support from Innosuisse. Seoho Jung, CEO of Chiral, said the company aims to close the gap between lab breakthroughs and industrial deployment: “Nanomaterials have shown outstanding performance in research for years, but without scalable and controllable manufacturing, their impact remains limited.”
Targeting the manufacturing bottleneck beyond silicon
Founded in 2023 as an ETH Zurich and Empa spin-off, Chiral is building tools and processes to integrate nanomaterials—such as carbon nanotubes and 2D materials—into semiconductor devices at wafer scale. As the industry confronts the physical and economic limits of Moore’s Law, these materials are increasingly viewed as a pathway to improved performance and energy efficiency, but adoption has been slowed by contamination and precision challenges in manufacturing.
Chiral says it is addressing this with what it describes as the industry’s first robotic nanomaterial integration system, combining automation, high-precision engineering, and AI to enable selective, contamination-free placement of nanomaterials onto silicon wafers.
Commercial deployments planned for 2026
Jung said the company is moving “from development into deployment,” with first commercial systems expected to be installed at customer sites this year, and customer results to be announced soon.
Krishna Visvanathan, co-founder and partner at Crane Venture Partners, said the opportunity lies in execution: “The next foundational shift in computing won’t come from materials alone… Chiral brings that level of engineering discipline to nanomaterials.”
Part of a broader European DeepTech funding wave
The financing adds to a broader rise in European investment in semiconductor-adjacent DeepTech across 2025–2026, as startups pursue alternatives to conventional silicon through advances in manufacturing, performance, and energy efficiency.
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