PARIS—At a lab tucked inside École Normale Supérieure, researchers five years ago were experimenting with something that sounds almost absurdly simple: using glass tubes and capillary action—the same force that pulls water up a plant stem—to draw microscopic patterns onto surfaces. The results, though? Those were anything but simple.
Today, that academic project has turned into Hummink, a deeptech startup that just closed €15 million (roughly $17.4 million) in Series B funding. Announced November 17, the round was co-led by KBC Focus Fund, Cap Horn, and Bpifrance, with a roster of backers that reads like a who's who of European tech investment: Elaia Partners, Sensinnovat, Beeyond, plus the European Innovation Council Fund and Bpifrance's French Tech Seed fund all participated.
What Hummink sells is precision—extreme precision. The company has developed what it calls High-Precision Capillary Printing, a micro-manufacturing technique it's taken to describing as "the world's smallest fountain pen." The target market: semiconductor and display manufacturers desperate to squeeze better yields from fabs that cost tens of billions to construct.
Here's what that means in practice. Hummink's system attaches glass micro-capillaries to macro-resonators, depositing materials at resolutions ranging from 50 micrometers down to just a few hundred nanometers. Unlike traditional lithography—which relies on masks and UV exposure—this approach uses capillary forces to directly write conductive inks and other materials onto surfaces. Think of it as printing rather than projecting.
The pitch is compelling, particularly for an industry obsessed with yield. Hummink claims its system can repair microscopic defects in under two seconds per defect. Material waste? Down by 30%, according to the company. Early testing with major display manufacturers in Asia—still undergoing qualification—points to yield improvements around 10%. In a sector where even a single percentage point can translate to millions in recovered revenue, those numbers matter.
Perhaps more telling: the company expects to double revenue by the end of this year, building from a €1 million baseline in 2024. It plans to double its workforce by 2026 as well, though the current team sits somewhere between 11 and 50 employees—a range that suggests the startup is still finding its footing in terms of scale.
Capillary Action Meets AI Demand
The timing, at least, appears favorable. Global fab equipment spending is projected to hit $110 billion in 2025, per SEMI, fueled largely by insatiable demand for AI and high-performance computing chips. Yield improvement technologies occupy a particularly sweet spot in this landscape. Build a leading-edge fab and you're already out tens of billions. Any tool that boosts production efficiency—even marginally—starts to look like a bargain.
Still, Hummink isn't operating in a vacuum. The precision printing space for electronics manufacturing has gotten crowded. Scrona, for instance, unveiled a 128-nozzle printhead at CES 2025, targeting semiconductor packaging. XTPL has begun deploying industrial modules for display defect repair. Then there are the incumbents: photonics and laser-based repair systems from firms like Coherent, which attack the yield problem from a different angle entirely.
The question becomes whether capillary printing—elegant as the physics might be—can scale fast enough to carve out a defensible position. Or whether it remains a niche solution, useful but not transformative.
From Academic Lab to Asian Fabs
Founded in July 2020 as a spinoff from École Normale Supérieure – PSL and CNRS, Hummink has moved with deliberate speed. It raised €700,000 in seed funding from Elaia Partners in October 2020, then €5 million in November 2022. The European Innovation Council has also backed the company through its blended finance mechanism, which mixes grants and equity for deeptech ventures—a recognition, perhaps, that this technology requires patient capital.
The company has established operations across the United States, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea. Its NAZCA micro-printing system is installed in research labs at Duke University and facilities scattered across Italy, Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. A Duke team recently used the technology to produce sub-micrometer printed carbon nanotube transistors, work published in Nature Electronics this past October—a validation of sorts, though academic success and commercial deployment remain very different challenges.
With the fresh €15 million, Hummink plans to push into advanced manufacturing facilities, accelerate development of industrial printing modules, and prepare its technology for in-line fab integration. That last part—getting installed directly into production lines—is where the real test begins. Semiconductor and display manufacturing are notoriously conservative industries. Convincing a fab manager to slot a new tool into a multi-billion-dollar process requires more than promising data. It requires trust, repeatability, and ironclad reliability.
Whether a micro fountain pen can deliver all three remains to be seen. But in an industry built on nanometer-scale tolerances, sometimes the smallest innovations carry the most weight.
