Additive manufacturing (AM) equipment specialist Keiron Printing Technologies has closed its first ever funding round. This historic milestone comes thanks to being awarded a phase 2 grant from NWO’s Take-off program, a funding instrument open to all scientific fields aimed at encouraging activity and entrepreneurship within the Dutch knowledge institutions and bringing innovative research results to market. After two years of design and development, and with this injection of funding, the Eindhoven startup will finally be able to finish building its first prototype. Completion of this so-called “Alpha Tool” is expected later this year and will enable Keiron to ramp up R&D projects with industrial partners and clients, while slowly moving into small-batch production.
Launching in 2019, Keiron opened its doors with a focus on the market of microfluidics, where the innovative proposition would enable manufacturers to deposit conductive lines on products to functionalize them on a mass scale. Two years later, however, the company is now positioning itself as a potential up and comer aiming to disrupt the industry of printed electronics, where its laser-assisted AM technology could prove to be extremely beneficial for a number of applications.
“We carefully planned our technical roadmap and found out there’s a lot more for the technology to help with. We see a lot of overlap in various applications,” says Keiron CCO Marco van Hoorn. “Building a product that can impact not just one, but multiple markets, is a startup dream.”