The funding round will accelerate production of chip-scale sensors that give any camera the ability to instantly analyze what it sees, from food and health checks to counterfeit detection and critical defence applications.
Agate Sensors, a startup developing chip-scale sensors for material analysis, has raised €5.6 million to commercialize a breakthrough that shrinks spectroscopy from suitcase-sized lab equipment to a chip smaller than a needle point. The Finnish startup’s technology allows devices to analyze the chemical composition of materials in real time, bringing high-precision material sensing out of the lab and into everyday devices, from smartphones and wearables to medical equipment and defense systems. The round includes €4M in seed funding led by Voima Ventures and LIFTT, plus €1.6M in grants from Business Finland.
“We’ve taken a spectrometer once confined to specialized labs and made it small and affordable enough to live inside everyday devices,” said Tommi Leino, CEO of Agate Sensors. “One sensor can shift between functions entirely through software — from diagnosing a health condition to detecting, identifying, and classifying objects and materials — changing how we interact with the physical world.”
Manufacturing of initial chips is expected by year-end, enabling proof-of-concept demonstrators throughout 2026 and first commercial smart wearable products targeted for late 2027.
“This funding allows us to commercialize a technology that fundamentally changes how machines perceive the world,” said Mikael Westerlund, CBO of Agate Sensors. “We’re not just building sensors, but enabling a new layer of light-based intelligence.”
Agate Sensors’ software-defined spectroscopy platform reads the “spectral fingerprint” of materials through light analysis. Built on new discoveries in semiconductor physics research from Aalto University, published in Science and Nature Communications, the technology represents years of development in miniaturizing laboratory-grade capabilities for mass market use.
“Agate Sensors’ platform is a leap forward in hyperspectral sensing: software-defined, scalable, and truly high-performance,” said Niko Elers, Investment Director at Voima Ventures. “It holds immense potential to reshape industries that rely on precise optical measurement, and we are very excited to support the company on the journey ahead.”
Modern sensors can identify objects, measure distances, and monitor environments. But they remain blind to material composition, a gap that’s becoming critical as AI and autonomous systems demand richer environmental understanding.
Agate’s platform opens a new dimension, enabling applications from multi-biomarker health monitoring in wearables, to detecting counterfeit goods in supply chains, identifying environmental hazards in industry, and even spotting camouflaged equipment in defence settings. These sensors capture not only visual data but also the chemical and molecular composition of materials in real time, allowing machines to chemically “see” and understand their surroundings: to tag and track materials by their unique spectral fingerprints, and to share this intelligence across networks for coordinated analysis.
Defence is among the earliest market-ready applications. For example, the sensors can distinguish between real foliage and synthetic camouflage materials, or identify specific vehicle types through their paint signatures.
“We believe this innovation will play a critical role in strengthening Europe’s technological sovereignty in defence and security,” said Pierluigi Freni, Project Manager at LIFTT. “For the first time, we have a technology capable of mass deployment that allows machines to understand what they see. This changes everything we know about spectral data usability and usage. We confirm our trust and belief in the Finnish innovation ecosystem, in which we have decided to continue investing. Given Agate Sensors’ technology’s strategic importance at the European level, we have also decided to involve our LIFTT EuroInvest fund, which is financed by the EIB.”
