This startup is Substrate. Substrate’s founders have no relevant industry experience and the main founder’s previous gig was a Kickstarter for an alarm clock that failed to deliver on most of their promises https://foxchapelresearch.substack.com/p/i-think-substrate-i...

So I suggest ignoring all of the Substrate hype until they share some proof.

Has anyone actually seen verification? (other than lot's and lot's of press release type collateral I don't see any evidence of anyone publicly stating that they work for this company. The press releases claim they have 50 employees many of whom were experienced frok semiconductor equipment companies but can anyone actually put their hand up and claim to be one of those people? Also the list of companies is a little suspicious as if designed to pass a sniff test for a naive audience and the careers page is particularly misaligned with what you would expect they're looking for. The only scientist they're hiring is an "AI" scientist?)

With their $100m of funding they could afford about 1/4th of one of ASMLs latest-gen machines.

Matching that when all you have is minuscule fraction of ASMLs R&D budget (~tens of billions for their latest process) would be... impressive.

There's a more likely explanation for their claims however.

From what I've been told by former ASML employees, ASML is not particularly worried about startups inventing a better method than their current lithography process because they basically run the entire chip production pipeline. Improving only one step of this pipeline is not enough to break their moat.

This came up on Stratechery recently. Shame on Stratechery for not asking any hard questions or digging deeper. There was some skepticism from Ben Thompson, but no actual ask for any sort of proof whatsoever. The interview came across like someone told them they had to interview this company (or applied lots of pressure to get their name out there). This MSN fluff piece does the same thing.

My theory is that they're carpet bombing the news and blogs with marketing pieces to get US Fed and more VC interest in this to secure financing. Note the strong nationalistic framing around building in the USA and it being an imperative of US place in the world.

LOL, I recommend highly to everyone who thinks a startup can challenge ASML this 1.38min video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_zgURwr6nA

Its an industrial flight video through a ASML TWIN Exe HighNAV.

Here is also a presentation of ~45min at CCC / Germany (in English language) which I highly recommend to watch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdppYYfQJgg

Especially the explanation how they use two milisecond laser shots to first molt the tin and then distribute it symetrically(!!!) with a second shot across the surface.

There IS NO chance that this startup will be able to somehow compete, if even Chinese state actors cant do it (yet).

SemiAnalysis published an interesting piece about this recently: https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/how-to-kill-2-monopoli...

Previously discussed on:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45767013

Discussing a blog entry titled "I think Substrate is a $1 Billion Fraud".

Also the company seems to be well-connected to the Trump-admin. Which I guess could be a good thing?

[dupe]

News from two weeks ago.

Some discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45745536

Over the years, especially in areas where some "hard science" is needed I've been seeing the US startup / US founder announcements where in reality is mostly a cash grab for VC money, a glowing marketing operation for some dipshit business venture outsourced to indians or easter europeans or the typical trust fund kid playing "Little Timmy does startup" game.

Sure not all of it, but a HUGE part of it.

To be clear ASML, like anyone, is disruptible... I'd just hate to see hucksters sour everyone's taste to the idea.

Would be fun to see them announce Tachyum as their first customer :)

Sounds like they need money.