Micledi grabs $25 million to make microLED displays for AR

Business news | March 12, 2024

By Peter Clarke

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Micledi Microdisplays BV (Leuven, Belgium), a microLED startup founded in 2019, has raised about US$25 million in a Series A funding round to commercialize microLED displays for augmented reality (AR) applications.

The round included participation from IMEC and IMEC.xpand and brings the total raised by the company to almost US$30 million (see MicroLED startup raises €4.5 million to develop AR microdisplays, January 2020).

Micledi used its 2020 seed funding to validate manufacturing on 300mm-diameter wafers and to prove its blue and green GaN-based microLED arrays with red performance on GaN and superior red performance on AlInGaP semiconductor material.

“This newest round of funding will be used to expand the team, design and build an active backplane ASIC, and create a fully-functional microLED display module that can be used in glasses for AR displays,” said Sean Lord, CEO of Micledi, in a statement. He added the money would also help support collaboration agreements with customers.

Customer Kopin

In January 2024 Micledi announced such a collaboration – with Kopin Corp. The program will utilize Micledi’s CMOS-based production flow and Kopin’s backplane control and driving capabilities and experience in manufacturing complete display systems, to create full color microLED displays These will be aimed at high-performance applications in defense, enterprise, consumer, and medical systems.

Micledi is a fabless vendor of display components but has agreements in place with IQE plc on wafer supply and with Globalfoundries on the transfer of its microLED manufacturing flow into a GF CMOS fab in conjunction with the manufacturing of backplane ASICs designed in GF’s CMOS.

Micledi said it will have full-color modules with active backplane addressing available in 2024.

The company added that it is developing configurations for intrinsic color arrays based on quantum dot filtering of green and blue arrays and said it will introduce its first demo glasses in 2Q24.