Applied Nanolayers Took EIC Accelerator Graphene Money, Then Sold

Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms that conducts electricity and heat better than almost anything else, and chipmakers have wanted it for two decades. The obstacle has been mundane: nobody could grow it cleanly and move it onto a silicon wafer in a way a semiconductor factory would accept. Applied Nanolayers, a spin-off of Leiden University graphene research, asked the European Union to pay for exactly that. In the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2 round of 5 June 2019 it was selected for SPRING, "Scalable Production and Integration of Graphene", with an EU contribution of €2,451,750 towards a €3,502,500 project, according to CORDIS and the European Commission's list of selected companies, which names Applied Nanolayers B.V. of Den Haag as the project's only beneficiary.

The company promised to take its "2D material foundry" to full commercial readiness, technology readiness level 9, and forecast revenues of €54 million and EBIT of "nearly €9m" within five years of the project's end. Eighteen months after SPRING closed, the company no longer existed under its own name. On 28 March 2025 Black Semiconductor, a graphene photonics start-up from Aachen, announced that it had acquired Applied Nanolayers, whose team of 10 now works as Black Semiconductor Netherlands.

What Applied Nanolayers Is Today

Applied Nanolayers is now a subsidiary. The Dutch company register entry, as shown by North Data, lists the same registration number, KvK 55596630, under the name Black Semiconductor Netherlands B.V. at Zilverstraat 1 in Zoetermeer, with Applied Nanolayers B.V. as the earlier name still used in a state aid record of 10 February 2025. The buyer's press release says the ANL team "joined Black Semiconductor, growing the company to 65 employees", and that the deal would speed up its technology development by two years. Bits&Chips and eeNews Europe reported the same terms. The price was not disclosed by either side. The Dutch M&A adviser IMAP says it advised the seller and describes the deal as an acquisition of majority control.

The Applied Nanolayers website now forwards to the Black Semiconductor announcement. The original company publishes nothing of its own.

The Technology: Graphene Grown on a Wafer, Not on Copper Foil

The usual industrial way to make large sheets of graphene is chemical vapour deposition (CVD) on copper foil. The foil is then dissolved in chemicals and the fragile carbon film is fished out of a liquid and laid onto its target, which leaves wrinkles, tears and residues that a chip factory cannot accept. Applied Nanolayers' process, as described in its CORDIS report, grows the graphene on a semiconductor wafer instead, which gives a flatter surface and fewer wrinkles. A "unique 2D delamination process" then lifts the layer off without dissolving anything, so the growth wafer can be reused, and an industry-standard wafer bonder presses it onto the customer's wafer. The aim was wafer-to-wafer transfer that fits into ordinary semiconductor production lines.

Because large equipment vendors did not build tools for graphene, the company built its own on existing tool platforms, the CORDIS objective says. Patent filings listed by North Data from 2023 and 2024 cover a substrate holder, a heating element for substrate processing, a material layer transfer method, cleaning of 2D material surfaces and a carrier stack for transferring 2D materials.

The quote is the company's own claim. None of those customers is named in any public source found for this article.

What SPRING Promised, and What the Record Shows

The grant agreement was signed on 24 September 2019 and SPRING ran from 1 October 2019 to 30 September 2023, the full 48 months, according to CORDIS. Two periodic reports were filed. The published summary is labelled as the second one, for April 2021 to September 2023, but its text describes "this first review period": high-temperature robot handling added to the CVD tool for automated batch operation, further automation of the delamination step, automated optical and Raman inspection that maps graphene coverage across every wafer, and a test chip to measure the electrical quality of transferred graphene. What happened in the final two and a half years is told only in the CORDIS results summary, in which Van Rijn says the company showed the process runs "on semiconductor production equipment at high volume and at a repetitively high quality" and built integration and post-processing for products such as sensors.

The acquisition announcement gives the clearest independent picture of where the technology stood when the company was sold: a "semi-automated 200mm process platform capable of producing 10,000 wafers per year". That is real production equipment, but not the fully automated, commercially proven foundry at technology readiness level 9 that SPRING set out to build. The CORDIS objective itself noted the transfer step was "not yet fully automated" when the project began; Black Semiconductor still described the line as semi-automated in 2025.

1. Automate graphene growth and transferPartlyRobot handling, delamination automation and inspection reported on CORDIS; the 200mm line was still "semi-automated" in 2025.
2. In-line quality controlDeliveredAutomated optical and Raman wafer mapping and an electrical test chip, per the periodic report.
3. Commercial foundry at TRL9PartlyFoundry service offered to customers; no named customer or volume order found.
4. €54M revenue within five years of project endNot achievedNo revenue published; the company was sold 18 months after the project ended with 10 staff.
5. Project completed on timeDeliveredRan its full term, 1 October 2019 to 30 September 2023.

What It Achieved Between the Grant and the Sale

In February 2022 Bits&Chips reported "a drastic increase in demand" for the company's wafer-sized graphene sheets, which customers used to make next-generation sensing devices. The same publication traces the company to a conversation in a Leiden bar between two university scientists who had studied graphene growth with scanning tunnelling microscopes and a British semiconductor industry veteran. A 2012 Leiden University announcement credits physicist Joost Frenken with "a leading role" in founding it, to produce large, high-quality graphene surfaces commercially.

The company also joined a second EU project. CORDIS lists Applied Nanolayers as a partner in STiBNite, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie training network on boron and nitrogen doped carbon materials coordinated by the University of Vienna, with a net EU contribution to the company of €265,619.88. EU state aid records shown by North Data add a €363,750 COVID-19 subsidised interest measure in December 2020 and €156,065 of South Holland SME innovation support in February 2025.

No private funding round could be verified. CB Insights counts the 2019 Horizon 2020 grant and the 2025 acquisition as the company's only financing events. Applied Nanolayers is not in the EIC Fund portfolio: a search of all 326 organisations on the EIC Fund invested companies list found neither Applied Nanolayers nor Black Semiconductor, which is consistent with a grant-only award. The company's filed Dutch accounts for 2022 to 2024 exist, according to North Data, but their figures are behind a paywall and could not be checked for this article, so revenue, losses and equity are not known.

The Buyer and What It Wants From the Line

Black Semiconductor is building a different business on top of the graphene. It wants to use graphene to convert electrical signals into light and back on the chip itself, so that thousands of chips can talk to each other as one system for AI and high-performance computing. In June 2024 it announced €254.4 million of funding, €228.7 million of it public money from Germany's economy ministry and North Rhine-Westphalia over seven years under the IPCEI ME/CT microelectronics programme and €25.7 million of equity led by Porsche Ventures and Project A, according to Power Electronics News and Silicon Canals.

The timelines in the buyer's own communications differ. The acquisition release speaks of a 300mm pilot line in 2025 and volume production "from 2029". Evertiq, reporting the opening of the FabONE headquarters in February 2025, gives an operational pilot line in 2026, pilot production in 2027, a transition to volume in 2029 and full volume in 2031. On 3 September 2026 North Rhine-Westphalia's premier Hendrik Wüst visited the Aachen site to mark the start of a new construction phase of the 15,000 square metre plant, according to the state government. Whether Applied Nanolayers' wafers reach a commercial product therefore depends on a factory that is still being built.

Why Europe Should Care

The European Chips Act, in force since 21 September 2023, aims to build up chip production capacity in Europe by 2030, and Black Semiconductor's public funding comes from one of the EU's Important Projects of Common European Interest in microelectronics. Materials and process know-how for post-silicon chips is exactly the kind of capability that strategy wants inside Europe. On that measure, the EIC grant has a defensible outcome: the team and its tools stayed in the EU, moving from a Dutch start-up into a German company with far more capital.

The other reading is less flattering. The EIC paid for a company to become a stand-alone graphene foundry with tens of millions of euros in sales, and that business did not emerge. The technology survived as an input to someone else's project.

The Verdict

Applied Nanolayers, Black Semiconductor and the EIC have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.