Private-equity firm Jolt Capital is leading a €21 million round of funding for MicroOLED, which designs and manufactures low-voltage micro-displays. Joining Jolt in the operation are the French sovereign wealth fund Bpifrance (through an entity called Innovation Defense) and two past investors in MicroOLED, Cipio Partners and Ventech.
The micro-displays use organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) to produce high pixel densities on minimal surface areas. According to the company, these outperform conventional LEDs and are becoming more common in the near-eye displays (NEDs) of camera viewfinders. The company is channeling its designs into five areas: defense & security, outdoor & sports optics, professional cameras, medical devices and – our chief concern – smartglasses.
MicroOLED has established a special division, called ActiveLook, for this last area and is keen on the markets for augmented reality (AR), in which information of some kind is superimposed on a view of the real world, and virtual reality (VR), where the full view is synthetic. The scheduled release next year of certain mixed-reality headsets is giving these markets a boost, MicroOLED believes. It cites reports by KBV Research and CCS Insight predicting that two things will occur by 2027: the market for AR/VR will reach a value of $4 billion and some 15 million pairs of smartglasses will ship.
Founded in 2007, MicroOLED is headquartered in Grenoble, France, and has so far invested about €25 million in research and development.
Last year, as we then reported, MicroOLED was planning an IPO on the Euronext Growth Paris market. The company had announced on Jan. 11, 2022, that its registration document had been approved by the AMF, France’s financial markets authority. The company has not yet responded to our inquiries about the IPO’s present-day status.