Building the future with nanoimprint lithography

What started in 2004 with two PhD students in the EU’s NaPa Consortium led to the founding of NILT in 2006. Over the years, strong backing from the European Commission supported the company’s growth. A turning point came in 2019 with a €2.3 million EIC Accelerator grant, enabling key advancements in nano-structured optics. This was followed by a €10 million equity investment—one of EIC’s first—contributing to a successful €26 million Series B round in 2021, and eventually leading to an exit of €300 million in early 2025.

Below, NILT’s founder shares how European support helped turn cutting-edge research into real-world innovation. 

“NILT’s love affair with EIC began… two years before NILT was even founded. 

In 2004, at the time Brian (NILT’s other founder) and I had just started our PhD programs, we joined the Emerging NanoPatterning Methods (NaPa) Consortium kick-off meeting at VTT in Espoo, Finland. This visionary NaPa initiative, funded by the 6^th EU Framework Program, had an enormous impact. It was the foundation and the reason behind the subsequent European leadership in nanoimprint lithography (NIL). 

Brian and I were little aware of the significance the NaPa project would have on our life in the following 20+ years. As young PhD students we immediately built a European network and we quickly became well acquainted with the research community. We were also given the opportunity to travel outside Europe, and we presented NaPa’s results in US and in Asia. 

The NaPa initiative did not only make Europe an absolute leader in nanoimprint lithography, it also ignited a desire in Brian and I to become entrepreneurs. From NaPa we got the very idea of building a company that would fit into the NIL value chain.  

And we launched NILT in 2006.  

We did not defend our PhD thesis, but that was a sacrifice we’ve never regretted. We started NILT with an investment of €150K from a Danish innovation hub, and most of their money came from government grants. It was in the early days of the startup craze in Europe. The two of us benefited from a solid knowledge of tech and a wide network, but our understanding of business was limited, far from what university graduates know today. A lot has happened in the past 20 years in terms of entrepreneurship acumen. 

Since 2006 we’ve received a lot of support from the European Commission. In the past 19 years we have participated in more than 10 funded projects, which have been of paramount importance to the development of our technology and our endeavors to mature the technology for commercialization.  

With NILT we saw an opportunity to build up a deep-tech company. Our ambition was to become the world dominating company with respect to designing and manufacturing advanced nanostructures for applications outside CMOS processing. In short, unlocking the commercial potential for nanotechnology in areas where physical nanostructures are needed. Our focus was to build masters used in NIL. The masters are to NIL what photomasks are to lithography tools in the semiconductor industry where the worldwide leader is ASML. ASML has always been a big inspiration for us as they have demonstrated that it is possible for European companies to be deep tech leaders. 

A few years ago we, however, changed the focus, shifting from being a mastering company supporting the NIL ecosystem, to focusing on our core technology instead. We then pivoted ourselves to becoming an optics company. We decided to use our masters in a NIL process, combined with other semiconductor processing techniques, such as etching, to build optics using nanostructures and focusing on the new and disruptive field of meta-optics.  

The pivot from technology (masters for NIL) to optical products (meta-optics) was supported by visionary investors who funded NILT in an A-round in December 2018. From 2019 we were on a new growth trajectory, with a very ambitious plan. Meta-optics is a completely new way of making optics, achieving the lens function by having a nanostructured flat glass surface as opposed to having curved lenses that we all know from daily life. One attribute of metalenses is that more than one classical lens can be included into a single surface, opening the way to extremely compact optical systems. Meta-optics are significant in their impact because they have the capability to completely disrupt how optics are designed and built in general. We are talking about a 45-billion-dollar market. The main challenge was that there were no standards and no established way of doing things. As a result, it was a tremendous task to build up a vertically integrated company, from design of the optics to prototyping, manufacturing and even building up the technology to assemble modules. It was this vision that Jolt Capital and NGP Capital bought into, back in December 2018, together with several seasoned business professionals with relevant market experience. Later we attracted Swisscanto Invest and the Danish Sovereign Fund (EIFO).  

To support our strategy, we applied for an EIC Accelerator program in 2019. It was the start of a great collaboration with EIC. The EIC Accelerator program was the perfect way for us to focus on building up demonstrators with nano-structured optics, as the program allowed for companies to be the single party. The grant was €2.3M and this was a huge boost for NILT at the time. In addition to the grant, EIC also committed €10M as equity investment.  

NILT was one of the first equity investments from EIC.  

We completed the fundraising with EIC’s participation in 2021 to our B round (total of €26M euro). The support from EIC obviously have had tremendous impact on the development and progress of NILT. In 2024 we wrapped up our C round (€33M) and that was followed up the acquisition of NILT by Radiant Opto-Electronics Corporation in 2024, which was ultimately completed in January 2025. Radiant having acquired NILT for €300M, it’s the first significant exit by EIC and the largest non-AI deep tech exit in Europe in 2024. 

To state the obvious, EC/EIC’s visionary strategy has played out perfectly in the case of NILT. We were supported in our exploration phase, and we got the equity investment boost at the right time. Deep tech takes time to develop, but a significant benefit is that it’s geographically sticky: NILT now has new owners, but we will continue to be anchored in Europe. We are growing faster than ever. In the first six months after acquisition, we are growing 30%, and we are planning out multimillion-euro investments in equipment and facilities here in Europe. In conclusion, I’m convinced we are a EIC textbook example of impactful deep tech investments benefiting Europe.” 

— Theodor Nielsen, CEO & Founder, NILT