Airmembrane Raises About ¥850M for Graphene EUV Pellicles

Airmembrane, a Japanese startup developing graphene pellicles for EUV (extreme ultraviolet) lithography, announced on October 30 that it has raised roughly ¥850 million in total. The round combines a third-party share allotment, a loan from Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation and a grant from NEDO, Japan's public research agency. The company did not disclose the individual amounts. Cumulative funding, including equity, debt and grants, now stands at about ¥10 billion...

Who is backing the company

Global Brain led the equity portion through its Fund No. 9, the Takanawa Chikyueki fund and the Shinhan-GB Future Flow fund. A-Start, KSP (through the NextG fund) and Mitsubishi UFJ Capital also took part, the latter as a follow-on investor. The NEDO grant comes from its program supporting practical R&D and mass-production demonstrations for deep-tech startups in the GX field.

Why the pellicle matters

A pellicle is a protective component for the photomask, the master pattern used in EUV chip production. Even tiny particles landing on a mask can cut manufacturing yield sharply. An EUV pellicle must be extremely transparent to light, dissipate heat at very high temperatures, stay chemically stable in plasma and remain mechanically strong. These requirements trade off against one another, and the company says few products worldwide meet all of them at a cost suited to volume production.

The main hurdle is producing graphene, a film one carbon atom thick and hard to handle, at high quality and in volume. Airmembrane says its continuous synthesis and automated transfer technology, developed from work at Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, addresses this. It claims synthesis speeds more than 100 times faster than conventional methods, with automated transfer removing fine defects and contamination.

Roadmap

In September, director and CBO Ryo Shinomoto presented the synthesis and transfer technology and the commercialization roadmap at SPIE Photomask Technology + EUV Lithography 2026 in Monterey, California. The new funds will go toward building mass-production capacity: a measurement system to control defects, uniformity and lifetime, with pilot production in 2027, and a volume production line for next-generation EUV scanners in 2028. Airmembrane already sells CVD graphene products, including the FR01 graphene FET chip, graphene sheets, TEM grids and a UV irradiation unit.