MICROOLED just nabbed €21 million ($23.1M USD) in fundraising led by Jolt Capital, a specialist in private equity for responsible tech companies using the French sovereign wealth fund Bpifrance. The funding is geared toward developing potential augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) displays.

As everyone knows, smartphones and tablet PCs can be used as gateways to augmented reality, but smart glasses could soon become the dominant wearable equipment to do so. They will require the use of embedded microdisplays that can offer high luminance and contrast, but also very low power consumption from super lightweight batteries. Among competing technologies, organic LED (OLED) demonstrate an excellent overall performance compared to classic LED ones, and they are increasingly used for see-through Near-Eye Displays (NED) in viewfinder eyepieces for cameras.

Recent announcements for new MR headsets (a.k.a. Apple’s Vision Pro) that could reach the shelves in 2024 have boosted the AR market, including applications for industry and security segments. The global market for microdisplays designed for AR/VR use could reach $4B by 2027, according to a 2022 report by KBV Research, a 4x increase compared to 2020, with 10% of the total value captured by OLED technologies. 15 million units of AR smart glasses could be shipped worldwide by 2027, according to CCS Insight.

Among the handful of international players able to design and manufacture these low-energy consumption OLED microdisplays, MICROOLED says it can address both consumer and recreational markets (the ActiveLook head-ups display module to be embedded in glasses for real-time visual information in hand-free activity use cases), and industry/security ones. Since 2007, the Grenoble-based company has developed a wide range of core technologies derived from the semiconductor industry, protected by over 170 granted patents, through a close collaboration with neighbor CEA/Leti research centers. MICROOLED is perfectly positioned to grab leadership in the field of wearable ultra-lightweight HUDs. To cater to the various needs for “light AR” applications, the company offers a line-up of compact products ranging from 0.2″ to 0.6” in size, with high resolution and power as low as 1mW.

MICROOLED’s €21 million financing round will allow MICROOLED to finance the development of the next range of full color, high luminance OLED solutions, to expand manufacturing capabilities in Grenoble, and to grow international sales teams in the security segment and the B2B ActiveLook platform model, according to the company. Both historical shareholders, Cipio Partners and Ventech, also reinvested in that new round.

Check out the plethora of applications this tech can activate here,