Modern life depends on semiconductors: everything from the cellphone in your hand to the latest AI models and most fundamental critical infrastructure relies on them. While the U.S. is a global leader in semiconductor design, we remain deeply reliant on foreign-owned fabrication plants and tooling for production. This dependency concentrates risk, stalls innovation, and weakens America’s position in a sector critical for economic growth, national security and global competitiveness.

At General Catalyst, we invest in companies that are building global resilience, modernizing our critical industries to meet the challenges of our evolving landscape. That’s why we’re excited to announce our investment in Substrate, a U.S.-based company working to restore American leadership in advanced semiconductor manufacturing by developing a faster, cheaper, more advanced manufacturing alternative to Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography.

Reimagining Chipmaking

We first invested in Substrate’s seed round more than three years ago, confident in founder James Proud’s trifecta of strengths: expertise in global hardware and supply chains, a first-principles founder mindset, and a deep passion for solving complex national security challenges once thought unsolvable.

James founded Substrate with several core convictions. He saw that the cost of semiconductor fabrication was rising rapidly and would continue to increase without a new technology paradigm. He also recognized that the U.S. was heavily reliant on a small number of external sources, creating significant geopolitical and supply chain risks. In his view, the only way to restore U.S. leadership in advanced semiconductor production was to create a completely new kind of vertically integrated foundry from the ground up.

It took nearly two decades and billions of dollars for traditional EUV lithography, the current manufacturing standard, to reach maturity. In comparison, Substrate has already successfully demonstrated its technological approach in a fraction of the time and cost. 

As seen in many industries transformed by technology, real breakthroughs often come from teams outside the established players who bring a first-principles approach to long-standing problems. Substrate’s world-class team of multidisciplinary experts includes scientists and engineers from leading U.S. national research labs, including co-creators of EUV lithography, as well as top talent from companies such as AMD, Apple, Applied Materials, Qualcomm, and TSMC. Their ability to start from a clean slate allowed them to pursue a fundamentally different path to advanced lithography, enabling chip production at leading-edge nodes while significantly reducing cost and complexity.

Onshoring Semiconductor Leadership

Substrate’s approach is designed to transform the economics of semiconductor manufacturing by dramatically reducing expenses, shortening wafer production cycles, and enabling faster, more cost-effective expansion of domestic foundry capabilities. Solving the semiconductor manufacturing bottleneck is just the beginning. While Substrate is initially focused on reinventing this critical layer of the semiconductor tooling stack, its broader ambition is to enable a new generation of U.S.-based, leading-edge fabrication plants, where chips are manufactured at scale. By lowering the cost and complexity of advanced lithography, Substrate intends to make building competitive domestic fabrication plants more feasible, helping to shorten supply chains, accelerate iteration cycles, and reduce reliance on geopolitically sensitive regions. In doing so, we see the company laying the foundation for a more resilient and self-sufficient U.S. semiconductor ecosystem.

Substrate’s mission embodies the audacious, systems-level vision we look for at General Catalyst. Building advanced semiconductor manufacturing capabilities in America is essential to modernizing and securing American industrial resilience. We’re honored to partner with James and the Substrate team as they work to restore American leadership in world-class chip fabrication and build the foundation for a more resilient semiconductor ecosystem.