Founded in 2022, Substrate is building a semiconductor manufacturing platform that uses particle accelerators as the light source for an X-ray lithography system. This approach employs wavelengths shorter than ASML’s extreme ultraviolet (EUV) tools, enabling the etching of complex patterns suitable for 2 nm process nodes. The company claims its technology can drop the projected cost of a leading-edge wafer from today’s roughly $100,000 to nearly $10,000 by the end of 2030. Substrate has already demonstrated wafer-scale patterning with resolution comparable to ASML’s latest High-NA EUV equipment at a U.S. national laboratory. It intends to leverage portions of the existing chip-manufacturing tool chain while eliminating the need for ASML’s multi-hundred-million-dollar EUV scanners and TSMC-style gigafabs. Commercial production is targeted for 2028, though management acknowledges the overall build-out could ultimately require “tens of billions” of dollars. The team includes scientists and engineers from U.S. national labs, TSMC, Applied Materials, AMD, Google, and Qualcomm, and the company has been developing its technology in stealth for three years.

Total raised

$100M

Funding rounds

1

Latest round

Seed

Latest activity

Oct 2025