It’s not every day a startup walks into the $2B EUV light-source market and says, “Nice laser, but we can do better.” But that’s exactly what xLight just did, and they’ve got the brains, the beamlines, and now $40 million in Series B funding to back it up.
Founded in 2021 by Nicholas Kelez, yes, the same Nicholas Kelez who helped architect SLAC’s Linac Coherent Light Source and played a key role at PsiQuantum, xLight isn’t just building lasers. They’re building the future of photonics for advanced semiconductor lithography, and doing it with the kind of quiet intensity that reminds you of a chess grandmaster who already knows how this game ends.
xLight’s core play? Replace the bloated, tin-guzzling LPP lightsources with a drop-in free electron laser that delivers 4× the power, 5× the efficiency, and zero consumables. That’s not marketing copy. That’s physics, built in Silicon Valley and stress-tested in national labs like CLASSE at Cornell, Fermilab, and Los Alamos. One FEL hub powers up to 20 EUV scanners. Think central power plant for lithography. No more laser-per-tool. Just scale, precision, and the kind of energy math fabs have been dreaming about.
This round, led by Playground Global and backed by Boardman Bay Capital Management, Morpheus Ventures, Marvel Capital, and IAG Capital Partners, isn’t about hype. It’s about momentum. When you’ve got Pat Gelsinger as Executive Chairman, Peter Barrett and Howard Ko in your corner, and a technical team pulled from SLAC, Berkeley Lab, and DOE’s elite, you’re not chasing trends. You are the trend.
And xLight isn’t quietly tinkering in a corner. They’ve already got skin in the high-NA EUV game with ASML, R&D deals inked with three national labs, and a roadmap that hits ≥2 kW EUV output by 2028. The real flex? Wavelength tunability under 11 nm, engineered to keep Moore’s Law from flatlining at sub-2 nm nodes.
This isn’t deep tech because it sounds cool, it’s deep tech because it has to be. Semiconductor scaling is one part physics, one part infrastructure, and all-out execution. Nicholas Kelez and Kevin Heidrich (ex-Onto Innovation SVP) know the drill. So do Bruce Dunham, Andrew Burrill, Chris Anderson, Ben Purser, and Dinh Nguyen, each one bringing real-world scars and scientific hardware to match.
This raise puts xLight on a collision course with the biggest names in silicon. The question isn’t if they’ll shift the EUV stack. It’s who’ll be smart enough to shift with them.
