Nearfield Instruments gets €17.5M capital injection

Raising 17.5 million euros, Nearfield Instruments (NFI) has successfully completed its Series B investment round. The publicly funded ‘impact investor’ Invest-NL contributed 10.5 million euros, topped up by the existing shareholder Innovation Industries. The Rotterdam-based TNO spinoff will use the capital to scale up its organization, which includes the introduction of a second subsurface metrology instrument.

Founded in 2016, NFI builds atomic force microscopes (AFMs) that create high-resolution 3D images of wafer surfaces by scanning them with many needles in parallel. This high sampling rate helps semiconductor manufacturers determine lot-to-lot, wafer-to-wafer and intra-wafer process variations. NFI made its first sale in December last year.

Rather unexpectedly, NFI and CEO Jos Maas parted ways last month, after only six months.