Scaling up to dozens of systems a year, Nearfield eyes IPO

Hamed Sadeghian wants to take Nearfield Instruments public within a few years. That’s a rather bold ambition for a company that only just shipped its very first product to a customer and is tormented by the challenges it faces in times of corona. But the move also expresses Sadeghian’s confidence in a fast scale-up. He expects Nearfield to ship about 50 to 60 of its high-value Quadra metrology systems within a few years. In addition, the Rotterdam-based company aims to grow worldwide staff to 170 plus at the end of the year, from 110 this summer.

The market Nearfield penetrates is particularly challenging. It targets the very high end of chip metrology. Its machines are designed to inspect integrated circuits at the device level at the scale of ångstroms (a tenth of a nanometer, smaller than an atom). The most obvious customers are Intel, Samsung, TSMC, Hynix and maybe a few others – the behemoths that currently dominate the semiconductor market and are still following Moore’s ruthless road towards ever smaller features on chips.