Technoprobe, Felici: ‘We are in a strong position and ready to face even the bursting of the AI bubble’
Founded in 1993 ‘in a garage’ in the Lecco area, as the CEO explains, Technoprobe now supplies its probe cards for chip testing to the industry’s leading players, from Taiwan’s TSMC to the American giants Intel and Nvidia
(Il Sole 24 Ore Radiocor) – The global artificial intelligence revolution is also being driven by an Italian company. Founded in 1993 ‘in a garage’ in the Lecco area, Technoprobe now supplies its probe cards for chip testing to the sector’s leading players, from Taiwan’s TSMC to the American giants Intel and Nvidia. Explaining this to Radiocor in an interview is CEO Stefano Felici, who has led the company through years of strong expansion, which has reached its peak in recent months, driven by AI. Whilst, from a financial perspective, 2026 is expected to close – according to the latest guidance – with a surge of almost 70 per cent in revenue to a figure between 1.05 and 1.1 billion, the company’s performance on the stock market is also remarkable. Despite the recent turbulence that has rocked the tech sector, the share price has in fact risen by over 108 per cent since the start of the year, reaching an all-time high of 38.1 euros per share (though it has since given up some of those gains and is currently trading at around 25 euros following a sector-wide consolidation). This performance earned the company a promotion to the FTSE MIB in September, the main index of the Milan Stock Exchange. Buoyed by these figures, Technoprobe looks to the future with confidence, even in the event of the expected correction in the tech sector or the possible bursting of an ‘AI bubble’. “We feel very solid from a financial standpoint,” says Felici. “So whatever happens, we’ll be ready to deal with it.” In the meantime, the group is capitalising on this positive momentum to focus on further business development both in Italia and abroad, with a particular focus on China.
On the other hand, an international outlook has been part of Technoprobe’s DNA right from the start, when it was a ‘small single-client supplier’ to STMicroelectronics. Under the leadership of the founders Giuseppe and Cristiano Crippa (the current CEO’s uncle and cousin, respectively), the company grew “by following the Italian-French firm’s sites around the world”. ‘Once we’d established ourselves in Italia,’ recalls Felici, ‘we expanded into France and Singapore’, before going on to ‘enter the American market around 2007’. The experience gained with ST in the production of probe cards for logic chips (i.e. all those chips such as processors or microprocessors that are not memory chips) soon made the Cernusco Lombardone-based company ‘ready to engage’ with the rest of the major players in the semiconductor sector. Thus, after years of growth and a gradual process of gaining market share, AI provided a further boost to Technoprobe’s business.
The rapid increase in GPU production (electronic computing chips ‘from the same family’ as processors) has, in fact, also driven demand for the probe cards for logic circuits manufactured by Technoprobe. An ‘innovative product, superior’ to that of its competitors and ‘a presence in all the key markets’, primarily Asia and the US, have done the rest. Today, in fact, the company led by Stefano Felici is ‘a leader in its sector’ with ‘a market share averaging between 60 and 70 per cent’. Its clients include the American and Asian giants of semiconductor design and manufacturing, such as Intel, Nvidia, Apple and Samsung, but above all ‘the foundry par excellence’, namely TSMC. ‘A hugely important hub for chip testing,’ explains Felici.
However, collaboration with big tech companies is not the only way in which Technoprobe is looking to Asia, a region that is becoming increasingly crucial to its business. In the summer, it signed an agreement in China with a local partner to invest 35 million dollars in its subsidiary Device Interface Solutions Technology (Dis). Through this move, the Lecco-based company aims to ‘create a genuine opportunity in a growing market’ via a company perceived as ‘less foreign’. Prior to the partnership – which will see the Chinese partner’s stake in DIS rise to 30 per cent – Technoprobe in fact “had a very small branch office in China with little chance of success”: particularly in light of the trade tensions between the US and China, ‘we were not a priority’ for customers and investors, whereas now the group wants to try to become ‘a strategic supplier’ in the country.
In general, Technoprobe’s aim is to strengthen its position across all markets and continue to ‘ride what market operators describe as an AI-driven supercycle, comparable to that of the internet or computers in the 1980s’. A veritable “tsunami”, as Felici describes it, which has already led the management to revise its 2026 guidance upwards on two occasions over the past year (with revenue now estimated at 1,050–1,100 million and an EBITDA margin of between 46% and 48%). And this is likely to fuel the group’s growth in 2027 as well. At present, “announcements from our clients, from Nvidia to AMD, are very bullish”, but “it is still too early to make predictions” about next year. In any case, the group is confident and is preparing for next year with “a massive effort to increase production capacity”, which will enable it to keep pace with the rapid rise in demand and product volumes ‘We have a budget of 350 million for investment by the first half of 2027’ for both R&D and production expansion, explains Felici.
