Mojo Vision has raised over $205 million in private funding. It seemed like the company had a thing for an AR display in a contact lens. It got a lot of attention. It laid off 75% of its staff in January, and now, the pivot. Mojo Vision is getting a $22.4 million Series A investment round to accelerate the development and commercialization of its MicroLED display technology and find a home for it among display manufacturers.
The funding round is led by existing investors NEA and Khosla Ventures, with participation from Dolby Family Ventures, Liberty Global Ventures, Fusion Fund, Drew Perkins, Open Field Capital, and Edge. And most of the team that got the company this far is still intact although, Nikhil Balram, formerly SVP and GM, has stepped into the CEO role.
We’ll have to assume that it is being called a Series A round because the company and its investors have restructured the business to take this Hail Mary. So, Mojo Vision has to go big.
And, it is. The company is aiming to disrupt the global display industry, it’s bigger $160 billion, and they want you to know that. The company will disrupt the industry by going after the usual suspects of market opportunities: AR/VR, automotive, light field display, large format displays, and other sectors.
The company has the technology to do it, and now the money. In 2019, Mojo Vision claimed to develop the smallest, densest dynamic display and touted it as a critical component of a smart contact lens, Mojo Lens. The display had a world record pixel pitch of over 14,000 ppi. But the smart contact lens was never going to fly, and now it’s MicroLED display technology. The company has proprietary technology, a nice acronym too, high-performance quantum dot (HPQD), and a genuinely capable team of display experts.
It says it is delivering on the promise of dynamic displays up to 28,000 ppi, efficient blue MicroLED devices at sub-µm scale, high-efficiency quantum dot ink for red and green, high brightness at 1 million plus nits, a display system incorporating an optimized CMOS backplane, wafer-to-wafer bonding, and custom micro-lens optics, as well as a high-volume manufacturing process based on 300 mm gallium nitride (GaN) on Silicon and an end-to-end 300 mm flow.
