Airmembrane, a Japanese start-up that makes graphene pellicles for extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) chipmaking tools, has raised about ¥850m (about $5.4m). The company announced the financing on 30 October 2026.
The total combines three sources of money: a share issue to outside investors, a loan from Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, and a grant from NEDO, the Japanese government's New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization. Airmembrane did not say how the ¥850m splits between the three, so the equity part of the round is smaller than the headline figure by an undisclosed amount.
Global Brain led the share issue through its ninth fund. The company did not give the round a name; signal/raise lists it as a Series A because it is the first multi-investor venture round led by an institutional fund since a seed round in 2024. No valuation was disclosed.
What Airmembrane makes
A pellicle is a very thin membrane stretched over a photomask, the stencil that an EUV lithography tool uses to print circuit patterns on silicon wafers. It keeps dust and other particles off the mask so that they do not print defects onto the chips. EUV pellicles must be thin enough to let the light through, shed heat, stay stable in the tool's plasma and remain mechanically strong, which is why graphene is seen as a candidate material, according to the Japanese start-up news site Sogyo Techo.
Airmembrane is a spin-out of AIST, Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology. It uses continuous graphene synthesis and automated transfer technology that came out of AIST's research. The company says its synthesis method is more than 100 times faster than conventional methods, and that automating the step of transferring the graphene film removes fine defects and contamination.
The company was founded in July 2017 and is based at the Tsukuba Research Support Center in Tsukuba, Ibaraki Prefecture. Masataka Hasegawa is its representative director and president. It has not disclosed how many people it employs.
Who invested
Besides Global Brain's ninth fund, the equity investors are the TAKANAWA GATEWAY Chikyu-eki fund, whose main limited partner is East Japan Railway Company (JR East); the Shinhan-GB Future Flow fund, run jointly by Shinhan Venture Investment and Global Brain; A-Start, through a fund it manages; KSP, through its NextG fund; and Mitsubishi UFJ Capital's ninth fund.
Global Brain said in its own release that the Shinhan-GB Future Flow fund first invested in Airmembrane in August 2024, and that the TAKANAWA GATEWAY fund, which Global Brain also manages, has about ¥10bn under management and focuses on the environment, mobility and robotics, and healthcare. Mitsubishi UFJ Capital's investment was described as an additional one.
Global Brain chief executive Yasuhiko Yurimoto said in the company's release that seeing Airmembrane overcome many technical hurdles and push towards mass production had strengthened the firm's confidence in its growth. Jinsoo Lee, an executive director at Shinhan Venture Investment, said the company's main strength was turning its graphene technology into mass-production technology that can work in real semiconductor manufacturing processes.
What the money is for
Airmembrane said it will use the equity, loan and grant money to build up mass production of graphene EUV pellicles. In 2027 it plans to build a measurement system that tightly controls defects, uniformity and lifetime, and to start pilot production. In 2028 it aims to launch a mass-production line for next-generation EUV exposure equipment.
The company is also hiring. It is looking for mass-production engineers in materials chemistry, thin-film processing, precision mechanical engineering and optical measurement, and for business staff to handle global business development, partnerships and investment planning. Global Brain said it will support the build-out and help Airmembrane form partnerships with companies in Japan and abroad.
Hasegawa said the company wants to use deep technology developed in Japan to solve a major problem facing the global semiconductor industry.
The funding so far
Airmembrane says it has now raised about ¥1bn (about $6.4m) in total, a figure that also counts loans and grants. According to the company's news page, it raised ¥100m in a seed round in August 2024 and took in money from two new venture investors in June 2025; it did not give the amount of the 2025 investment on that page.
The NEDO grant that forms part of this financing comes from a programme that supports deep-tech start-ups in green transformation fields with practical research and mass-production demonstration. Airmembrane was selected for that programme in November 2025, according to its news page. The start-up database Speeda startup-db also listed the round, with the same investors, in its weekly funding digest for 26 to 30 October.
Company website: airmembrane.co.jp