QDI Systems' EIC Accelerator Paints Quantum Dots on Sensors

Shortwave infrared cameras can see through fog, smoke and haze, and sort materials by what they are made of, but the sensors cost a fortune because they are built from indium gallium arsenide. QDI Systems, founded in Groningen in 2019 as a spin-off of the university's Zernike Institute, coats ordinary silicon readout chips with lead sulphide quantum dots applied as an ink. The same trick works for X-rays, and the company claims five times the sensitivity of amorphous selenium at low dose and more than 80% absorption of high-energy photons for contrast-enhanced mammography.

The EIC Accelerator selected the project, QDIMAGING, at its October 2024 cut-off for blended finance, and CORDIS records a grant of €2,499,612.50 from June 2025 to May 2027. The project's argument for urgency in medicine is blunt: the highest-resolution X-ray detectors rely on technology more than 15 years old, which produces unacceptable false positive and false negative rates in mammography, especially for dense breast tissue.

The infrared half is selling

On 1 October 2026 QDI and the German camera maker Vision Components announced MIPI camera modules built around QDI's sensors, the first with the QDI 6410 at 640 by 512 pixels and a spectral range of 350 to 1850 nanometres, available for evaluation shortly after the Vision trade fair in Stuttgart, with SXGA and Full HD versions in development. The pitch is price: quantum dot sensors can be made on standard silicon readout wafers, which the companies say makes SWIR viable for uses that InGaAs sensors are too expensive for, from plant health monitoring and water shortage mapping to recycling sorters and drones for wildfire detection and search and rescue. In April 2026 QDI had already announced a partnership with Allied Vision on the same transition beyond InGaAs.

Both announcements stress European manufacturing: the sensors designed and made in Europe with no reliance on critical raw materials, the camera modules made in Germany. For a sensor market dominated by American and Japanese suppliers, that is the sovereignty argument the EIC funds.

The X-ray half is a prototype

The medical side is earlier. In July 2025 QDI and the Swiss research centre CSEM announced what they described as the world's first image sensor to convert X-rays directly into electronic signals using quantum dots on a CMOS platform, usable from X-ray through visible light to shortwave infrared. That is a research milestone, published alongside a 2024 paper on a quantum-dot-coated sensor with wide spectral sensitivity. No mammography system, clinical study or medical regulatory step has been announced, and the sensitivity claims in the project remain the company's own.

1. SWIR sensors in productsFor evaluationVision Components modules announced October 2026, available for evaluation.
2. Manufacturing capabilityIn placeCleanroom and wafer-level processing in Groningen.
3. Direct X-ray sensorDemonstratedJoint CMOS sensor with CSEM, 2025.
4. Mammography claims testedNot published5x sensitivity and 80% absorption are project claims.

Regional money, then European

QDI announced €5 million of funding in 2021 and a Series A in 2024 of €3 million in equity led by the northern Dutch development agency NOM with Carduso Capital, RUG Ventures and the Finnish fund Maki.vc, plus a €1.97 million loan from the Netherlands Enterprise Agency. The EIC award was announced in February 2025 as up to €7.5 million, of which €2.5 million is the grant in CORDIS; the rest is equity that has not been announced as invested. The company's accounts were not obtained for this article.

Two markets, one coating

The interesting thing about this project is that it funds a materials capability rather than a product. The same quantum dot ink serves a fast commercial market, industrial and agricultural infrared imaging, where partners can sell cameras this year, and a slow regulated one, medical X-ray, where the payoff is better mammograms and the timeline runs in years. The EIC grant covers both, and the company's own commercial progress is concentrated in the easier half.