Mojo Vision, a company once noted for its work on smart contact lenses, has raised $22.4 million in a new Series A investment round which it will use in a pivot to develop and commercialize micro-LED display technology for consumer, enterprise, and government applications.
The funding round is led by existing investors NEA and Khosla Ventures, with participation from other investors including Dolby Family Ventures, Liberty Global Ventures, Fusion Fund, Drew Perkins, Open Field Capital, and Edge.
The new Series A comes months after the company was forced to put its smart contact lenses on hold, which also included a 75% downsizing in the company’s workforce.
Prior to the pivot, the company had amassed $205 million in outside investment, with its most recent in January 2022 bringing to the company $45 million.
Its new focus is on displays for AR/VR, automotive, light field, large format displays and others that require high performance micro-LED displays. Mojo’s prototype smart contacts made use of its own in-house displays, which at the time included a monochrome display capable of over 14,000 pixels per inch (ppi).
Now the company is developing its own High Performance Quantum Dot (HPQD) technology to make a “very small, very bright, very efficient RGB pixel,” the company says in a press statement.
The company is boasting a number of advances in its proprietary technology, including dynamic displays with up to 28,000ppi, efficient blue micro-LED devices at sub-μm scale, high efficiency quantum dot ink for red and green, high brightness at 1M+ nits, and a display system that incorporates an optimized CMOS backplane, wafer-to-wafer bonding, and custom micro-lens optics.
Mojo Vision’s new CEO, Dr. Nikhil Balram, is said to bring semiconductor and display technology expertise to the company:
“The market opportunity in the display industry is big – over $100 billion. Sometimes in order to do something very big, you have to start very small. That is exactly what we are doing at Mojo,” said Balram. “We started by developing the world’s smallest, densest dynamic micro-LED display, and now we are applying that innovation to power the next generation of displays. Mojo is combining breakthrough technology, leading display and semiconductor expertise, and an advanced manufacturing process to commercialize micro-LEDs for the most demanding hardware applications.”
“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,” concluded Balram.