A Series A With Public Money Behind It
Euclyd, a Dutch AI-chip startup based at Eindhoven's High Tech Campus, closed a Series A financing round of more than EUR 200 million on September 15, 2026.
Samsung Electronics, Somerset Capital Partners, the EU's own Scaleup Europe Fund, managed by EQT, and Innovation Industries led the round, with EIFO, imec.xpand, the Brabant Development Agency and Quadri also putting money in.
That investor list reads less like a typical chip startup's cap table and more like a coordinated European position: an EU fund, a Danish export credit institution and a Dutch regional development agency sit next to Samsung and private venture capital, all backing the same attempt at a domestic alternative to importing AI compute.
| Investor | Role |
|---|---|
| Samsung Electronics | Lead investor |
| Somerset Capital Partners | Lead investor |
| Scaleup Europe Fund (EQT) | Lead investor |
| Innovation Industries | Lead investor |
| EIFO | Additional backer |
| imec.xpand | Additional backer |
| Brabant Development Agency (BOM) | Additional backer |
| Quadri | Additional backer |
The Chairman Who Used to Run the Chokepoint
Peter Wennink, President and CEO of ASML from 2013 to 2024, joined Euclyd's board as non-executive chairman as part of the announcement.
For over a decade Wennink ran the one company that genuinely controls a link in the global chip supply chain, since ASML's extreme ultraviolet lithography machines are the reason advanced chips get made anywhere at all.
His move to chair an AI inference chip startup, rather than another lithography or materials company, reads as a bet on where the next chokepoint sits: not in making chips, but in owning the silicon that runs the models everyone now depends on.
What Craftwerk Actually Claims to Do
Craftwerk is Euclyd's programmable ASIC compute chip for AI inference workloads, which the company calls the world's first agentic AI silicon.
Craftwerk Station CWS, also referenced as CWS 32, is described by Euclyd as the world's lowest power exascale AI factory, combining processor memory co-design with system level optimization to cut the cost of running inference at scale.
Euclyd frames its own mission as building a future in which advanced AI is no longer constrained by infrastructure cost, power availability or geography, and it is now hiring silicon architecture, design, verification, systems, firmware and compiler engineers to get there.
A Board Seat Is Not a Shipping Date
Wennink's chairmanship and the EUR 200 million round do not by themselves prove that Craftwerk will ship a chip that changes anything for European AI buyers.
Euclyd's own language describes Craftwerk as still in advanced design, and none of the sources confirm a production date, a sampling schedule or a single committed customer, while independent benchmarks for the power and cost claims do not yet exist.
Nvidia's advantage was never just silicon: its CUDA software ecosystem and installed base took a decade to build, and a European chip alone, however well funded or well chaired, does not remove that gap.
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