About Substrate
Substrate was founded in 2022 by brothers James and Oliver Proud, with James Proud, a serial entrepreneur, serving as CEO, pursuing an audacious technical goal: developing lithography equipment, the extraordinarily precise machines used to pattern the microscopic circuits onto silicon wafers that make modern semiconductor chips possible, as a domestic American alternative to ASML, the Dutch company that holds an effective global monopoly on the most advanced extreme ultraviolet lithography machines used to manufacture the most cutting-edge computer chips, a monopoly position that has become an increasingly significant strategic and national security concern given U.S. export controls restricting China's access to ASML's most advanced equipment and broader anxieties about American dependence on a single foreign company for such a critical technology chokepoint.
Substrate's technical approach, which the company kept in stealth development for several years before publicly emerging, uses a novel form of X-ray lithography powered by a compact particle accelerator as its light source, rather than the extreme ultraviolet light sources that ASML's machines use, a fundamentally different underlying physics approach that the company claims, after overcoming significant early engineering challenges including vibration issues that initially prevented precise printing, can achieve chip-patterning resolution comparable to ASML's most advanced current systems. The company has stated an ambition not only to build competing lithography equipment but to use that equipment to establish its own domestic semiconductor fabrication operations, aiming to begin commercial chip production as early as 2028, and has discussed plans for an extremely large particle accelerator and fabrication facility, potentially located on Texas A&M University's campus, that could cost as much as $10 billion, alongside preliminary discussions with Intel. Substrate closed a $100 million Series A round in October 2025 at a valuation exceeding $1 billion, making it a unicorn company before generating any revenue, with investors including Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, General Catalyst, Valor Equity Partners, and In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital arm, reflecting both the strategic national security significance and considerable technical risk associated with the company's ambitious effort to break ASML's decades-long dominance of advanced chipmaking lithography equipment.
