Over the past few years, Mojo Vision has made significant progress in the development of Mojo Lens, the first augmented reality smart contact lens. Last year, we demonstrated the first feature-complete prototype of the lens, and I was the first person to wear and test this breakthrough technology. Yet even as we made important product development progress, Mojo has faced significant challenges in raising capital. The slumping global economy, extremely tight capital markets, and the yet-to-be proven market potential for advanced AR products have all contributed to a situation where Mojo Vision has been unable to find additional private funding to continue its development of Mojo Lens.
In order to capitalize on a more immediate market opportunity, the company has decided to pivot its business and focus its resources on Mojo’s Micro-LED technology.
This change means that Mojo Vision has also made the difficult decision to decelerate work on Mojo Lens. We are directing company resources toward the continued development and commercialization of our world-class Micro-LED display technology, where we know there is significant near-term market potential.
Developed as a critical component of Mojo Lens and first announced in 2019, the Mojo Vision 14K PPI Display is the smallest, densest dynamic display ever made, and the Micro-LED technology platform underlying it is powerful and flexible enough to serve a wide range of applications from next generation wearables all the way up to future televisions and video walls. We believe Micro-LED will disrupt the entire $160B display industry and our unique technology puts us at the forefront of this disruption.
With this shift in focus of our business comes a significant change in our organizational structure, and Mojo Vision has reduced staffing across a variety of departments and functions. The reduction represents approximately 75 percent of the company’s workforce.
Over the past seven years, I along with CTO Mike Wiemer and other talented leaders, have had the good fortune and honor to lead this exceptional Mojo team toward the audacious goal of reinventing personal computing. Mojo Lens is a monumental technical and medical achievement that others have only dreamed of.
Although we haven’t had the chance yet to see it ship and to reach its full potential in the marketplace, we have proven that what was once considered science fiction can be developed into a technical reality. Even though the pursuit of our vision for Invisible Computing is on hold for now, we strongly believe that there will be a future market for Mojo Lens and expect to accelerate it when the time is right.
For now, though, this pivot will give Mojo the best opportunity to channel its efforts into nearer-term success. We have investor support, customer interest, and market excitement around our Micro-LED technology – this has the potential to be a very big business.
Lastly, I wanted to make sure that I acknowledged and thanked everyone at Mojo Vision, along with our investors, partners and other stakeholders for all the hard work, long hours, and support that have gotten us to this point. We have accomplished a great deal of what we set out to do, and for that we should all be incredibly proud.
Mojo Vision CEO Drew Perkins
We have covered Mojo Vision previously: its microLEDs and it’s AR technology, to name two instances. The company has raised over $200 million in private funding through multiple rounds (the last round was for $45 million in January, 2022), and yet it is going to lose 75% of its staff, and pretty much its hype. The promise of integrating AR into our daily real-world visual experiences is the stuff of sci-fi. Doesn’t mean it can’t happen. Doesn’t mean it isn’t useful. But, I don’t see enough pathways from actual problems to AR solutions that win.
Consumers have to know what the benefit of AR is to them in a very accessible and authentic manner. If it is just to give them more of the stuff they already try to avoid on their other displays, well, you can see how depressing that can be. We have had years of Bluetooth earbuds and you still have a bunch of people standing around with their phones held in front of their mouths, like some sort of glass tray, and everyone getting to listen to the their conversations on the speaker. Clear benefit to earbuds or headsets; clear reluctance by people to shove things into their ears.
Build a product for a specific need. It is that simple. Shoving a lens in someone’s eye and promising some sort of dystopian future where your retina burns out from Facebook ads is not a winning proposition. Because, you know, at the end of the day, mobile apps are pretty much ad traps or subscription hounds. Do I really need that imprinted on my cornea?
