Eyeo, a spinoff from imec, presents a new image sensor architecture that it claims eliminates the need for traditional color filters, thereby optimizing sensitivity without increasing sensor size.
Jun. 26, 2025 –
As Europe races to strengthen its strategic autonomy in key areas such as semiconductors, photonics, and AI hardware, one big area of focus lies in a new generation of startups that fall under the broader category of deep tech: ventures grounded in scientific breakthroughs and designed to tackle fundamental industrial and societal challenges.
Olivier Rousseau, director of venturing at imec, believes the region is experiencing a fourth wave of innovation. “We’ve moved from industrialization to digital transformation—and now we’re in the era of deep-tech disruption,” he told EE Times Europe. “These startups address core societal challenges using cutting-edge science: semiconductors, nanomaterials, biology, and molecular engineering. But they require more time, capital, and ecosystem support than classical tech ventures.”
That combination of risk and reward is precisely what makes deep tech so compelling—and so difficult to scale in Europe, where raising funds is often more challenging than in either North America or Asia.
Europe has fewer VCs with deep-tech expertise. The U.S., by contrast, has well-established specialist funds such as Lux Capital, DCVC, or Playground Global. And Asia has stronger public-private investment mechanisms—for example, Japan’s SBI, Korea’s deep-tech initiatives, and China’s state-backed funds. Moreover, even when European deep-tech startups secure early-stage funding, they often struggle to raise scale-up rounds, especially for capital-intensive tech such as chips.
Companies like eyeo, a spinoff from imec’s imaging R&D program, offer a glimpse of what’s possible when infrastructure, talent, and funding align. Based on the pre-investment in a research project initiated at imec in 2018 and formally founded as a company in 2024 after one year of internal company shaping and incubation, eyeo recently closed a €15 million seed round co-led by imec.xpand and Invest-NL, alongside several regional innovation funds.
The startup replaces the decades-old Bayer color filter in image sensors with a waveguide-based color-splitting structure that is claimed to capture 3× more light and break through the sub-0.5-micron pixel barrier. In doing so, it expects to redefine imaging in everything from smartphones and AR/VR glasses to machine vision and medical diagnostics.
“Our technology guides photons directly to their destination, instead of filtering them,” Jeroen Hoet, CEO of eyeo, told EE Times Europe. “We’re not just tweaking old systems; we’re redefining the front end of image capture.”