Back in April, Mojo Vision announced a new $22.4 million Series A. Six months later, the round has nearly doubled to $43.5 million, courtesy of New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Khosla Ventures, who co-led the round.
It’s been nine months since the startup announced a big pivot the week of CES. Mojo Vision shifted its wildly ambitious plans to produce augmented reality contact lenses, instead opting to focus on the nearer term goal of producing micro-LED panels. In June, the company announced that it had produced a red micro-LED display — a piece of the puzzle in bringing green and blue into the full color fold.
The red display sports a 14K PPI resolution. The micro-OLED displays created for Apple’s Vision Pro are roughly at 3,400 PPI — that’s still extremely dense, mind you. The iPhone 15 Pro Max’s display comes in at 460 PPI — dense for a phone screen, but mixed reality is an entirely different conversation.
The technology is built atop work the company was doing to develop displays for its contact lens project, including its proprietary quantum-dot tech.
“Mojo Vision developed a world-class AR display the size of a grain of sand and is now extending that same technology across the industry for the next generation of displays,” co-founder Drew Perkins said in a release. “From the initial ideation of Mojo Vision, our engineers have set our technology apart as a catalyst to enhance user experiences.”
Staking your fortune on mixed reality feels like a bit of a risky bet after decades of attempts to get AR and VR off the ground in a meaningful way. Meta has seen limited success in the category, in spite of being the leader by a significant margin. Early next year we’ll see whether Apple can truly move the needle after all.