Mojo Vision appoints CEO, pivots away from smart contact lens
MicroLED developer Mojo Vision has announced a $22.4 million round of funding to help it move from developing smart contact lens to displays.
The company has also appointed Nikhil Balram, formerly leader of the display group at the company, to the post of CEO. Balram has replaced Mojo co-founder Drew Perkins as CEO. Perkins continues as chairman of the board of directors. The company said it is “decelerating” its work on a smart AR contact lens in favour of more conventional microLED displays.
The company was founded in 2015 but is still working on the development and commercialization of its microLED display technology. The latest round of funding brings the amount raised by the company to more than $200 million.
The funding round is led by existing investors, NEA and Khosla Ventures, with participation from additional investors including Dolby Family Ventures, Liberty Global Ventures, Fusion Fund, Drew Perkins, Open Field Capital, and Edge.
Mojo said it is pursuing market opportunities in the areas of augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR), automotive, light field display, large format displays and others that would benefit from high performance micro-LED displays
In 2019, Mojo Vision demonstrated a monochrome display with world-record pixel pitch of 14,000 pixels per inch. This display is a critical component of the Mojo Lens augmented reality smart contact lens.
Different emphasis
Balram has replaced Mojo co-founder Drew Perkins as CEO. Perkins continues as chairman of the board of directors.
Balram has more than 30 years of semiconductor and display technology experience: he most recently held the position of chief executive officer at AR systems company EyeWay Vision Inc. and prior to that, led the Display Group at Google, leading development of display systems for all Google consumer hardware products, including AR/VR. Mojo Vision co-founder Mike Wiemer will continue as chief technology officer at the company.
“This round of funding will enable us to deliver our breakthrough monolithic micro-LED technology to customers and help bring high-performance micro-LEDs to market,” said Balram, in a statement.
Mojo Vision has developed a proprietary quantum dot technology to make RGB pixels and claims its technology includes the following advances:
- Dynamic displays up to 28,000 pixels per inch
- Efficient blue micro-LED devices at sub-µm scale
- High efficiency quantum dot ink for red and green
- High brightness at 1M+ nits
- A display system that incorporates an optimized CMOS backplane, wafer-to-wafer bonding, and custom micro-lens optics
- A high-volume manufacturing process that is based on 300mm gallium nitride (GaN) on Silicon, and an end-to-end 300mm flow
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