Hummink's EIC Accelerator Printer Heads for Display Factories

Display factories discard large parts of their production because of microscopic flaws. Hummink, a 2020 spin-off of the École Normale Supérieure PSL and the CNRS in Paris, prints metal and other materials through a nanoscale tip with controlled flow, a method it calls High-Precision Capillary Printing, or HPCaP, and wants to use it to repair such defects on the production line.

The EIC Accelerator selected the project, BIRD, at its October 2024 cut-off for blended finance, and CORDIS records a grant of €2,499,087.50 from June 2025 to May 2027. In November 2025 Hummink raised a €15 million Series A in which the EIC Fund took part. According to the first periodic report, the industrial repair module is designed and in assembly, and a tier-1 display manufacturer is testing the method.

Printing through a capillary tip

HPCaP deposits liquid materials, mainly metal inks, through a fine tip at resolutions from 100 nanometres to 50 microns, on many kinds of surface, according to the project summary. Hummink was founded by materials scientist Amin M'Barki and hardware entrepreneur Pascal Boncenne, Silicon Canals reported, and the French register lists M'Barki as president.

Its first product is NAZCA, a printer for research labs that has reached technology readiness level 8 and is used by labs and research centres in Europe, Asia and the United States, including Duke University. Hummink also sells the conductive inks for it. That business brought in €918,523 of revenue in 2024, against a net loss of €1.14 million, the register shows.

BIRD: a repair module for the production line

BIRD is to turn the printing head into a module that sits inside a factory and repairs defects as panels and chips are made. The first periodic report, for June 2025 to May 2026, is unusually specific. Hummink released a compact printhead module of 411 by 296 by 465 millimetres and under 30 kilograms, validated its own control boards and put a pilot version into production, wrote firmware with closed-loop control, and built a test bench that is about 90% complete. Prototype parts were ordered for assembly in the second half of 2026.

On the process side, the team printed gold lines down to 3 microns and vertical pillars with 90% success, reached more than 90% printability with its silver ink at more than 30% of the conductivity of bulk silver, validated laser sintering of printed silver, and scaled its ink production from 4 to 20 millilitres a week. Positioning precision is at the 500-nanometre level, and a full repair takes 2 minutes 30 seconds. One peer-reviewed paper appeared in ACS Nano, and two new patent applications were filed.

The commercial signal is in the same report. A tier-1 display manufacturer, not named, benchmarked 40 candidate technologies and chose HPCaP as the only one meeting its requirements; one repair application, for open electrodes, is qualified and four more are under evaluation. Early tests indicate a yield gain of about 10%. The acceptance plan includes factory and installation tests and a 1,000-hour endurance run on a display line, all still to come.

1. Industrial printhead moduleIn assemblyDesign released; prototype parts ordered for the second half of 2026.
2. Repair applications qualified with a display maker1 of 5Open-electrode repair qualified, per the periodic report; four under evaluation.
3. Materials and processDelivered3 µm gold lines, silver ink at more than 30% of bulk conductivity, laser sintering validated, as reported by the company.
4. 1,000-hour run on a display linePlannedIn the acceptance plan; not yet carried out.

A Series A with the EIC Fund on board

The €15 million round announced on 17 November 2025 was co-led by KBC Focus Fund, Cap Horn and Bpifrance, with Elaia Partners, Sensinnovat, Beeyond, the French Tech Seed fund and the European Innovation Council Fund, according to Silicon Canals and the company's GlobeNewswire release, which gave the amount as $20 million. The money is to build the industrial module and integrate it into fabs, and Hummink said it would double its workforce by 2026.

European equipment for Asian fabs

The display makers qualifying Hummink's method are in Asia, and the company has teams in Taiwan, Japan and South Korea. The technology, the patents and the module development stay in Paris. For the EU, a French supplier of a repair step that Asian fabs adopt would be a foothold in semiconductor and display manufacturing equipment.