Mojo Vision's Successful Business Pivot in Developing Micro LED

It is not rare for companies to massively pivot away from their core business and focus on a new niche. These risky and anxiety-inducing shifts have become especially true and increased mainly due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Whether in the way they operate, in their distribution and target market, or in their core goods and services, several companies have successfully undergone big changes and reinvented their business.

This includes Mojo Vision, a Saratoga, California-based company that started working on AR-focused smart contact lenses but pivoted to creating Micro LED displays with a piece of technology they’ve previously developed.

Early Smart Contact Lenses Days

Smart wearables have gained traction over the years, which have mainly come in the form of smartwatches, but more industry players started working on developing smart eyewear, too.

This includes Google with its Google Glass, Meta with its acquisition of smart lensmaker Luxexcel, and Verily with its glucose-measuring contact lens for diabetes patients development that they, unfortunately, had to stop, as well.

With plenty of companies trying, it is not at all surprising that Mojo Vision started becoming a player in the industry as well. The company made enormous progress and developments on AR-focused smart contact lenses, which the company called Mojo Lens, before halting its progress.

Mojo Vision came up with Mojo Lens in 2015 and started making early developments in 2017. Though many of the company’s employees viewed the AR-infused project without much optimism at first, the team behind Mojo Lens managed to get much closer to what they thought was impossible.

By 2019, Mojo was granted an Institutional Review Board certification which allowed its employees to test the smart contact lenses with their own eyes. Not long after, the company presented the lenses to the FDA and got admitted into the Breakthrough Devices Program. With the FDA’s support, Mojo managed to showcase the Mojo Lens’ functional prototype during a demo suite at AWE 2022.

Mojo’s engineers and scientists succeeded in creating the world’s smallest and densest micro LED display technology with its smart contact lenses and found several valuable, potential applications aside from medical use for the partially impaired. This included assisting athletes, firefighters, and the US military.

Unfortunately, the company couldn’t maintain its funding for the Mojo Lens’ development due to the pandemic. According to former CEO Drew Perkins, the yet-to-be-proven market potential for advanced AR eyewear also became one of the reasons Mojo stopped developing the Mojo Lens.

The Now with Micro-LED Displays

Under new leadership, Mojo focuses on incorporating the micro LED technology they have developed into broader and more practical applications in the semiconductor and display industry.

Current CEO Nikhil Balram believes that Mojo’s advanced micro LED technology will thrive in the disruptive industry of display and that the market will develop much faster compared to the beachhead market of smart contact lenses. Thus, the company targets the AR/VR, automotive, light field display, and large format display sectors as its market, along with others desiring high-performance micro LED displays.

Balram believes that though the Mojo Lens would undoubtedly change the world, applying Mojo’s micro LED tech onto displays like TVs or laptops could potentially reduce power usage to 10% of what it is today, greatly impacting sustainability.

After already displaying a tiny green Micro LED with 14k pixels per inch through its Mojo Lens prototype, Mojo revealed its 300-millimeter blue GaN-on-silicon wafer last May and its highest density of 14K ppi red micro-LED microdisplay last June. With its three-panel architecture of dynamic displays completed, Mojo is confident of its efficient and highly optimized display system.

Balram has stated that Mojo may revisit the development of the Mojo Lens someday if the market conditions allow. Its rise wouldn’t be a big surprise either since the company has managed to take a big step forward in the Mojo Lens’ development and patents.

After scaling back from 120 people to 35, Mojo Vision raised $22 million in a funding round led by NEA and Khosla Ventures, with Dolby Family Ventures, Liberty Global Ventures, Fusion Fund, Drew Perkins, Open Field Capital, and Edge as participants. The company will utilize the funds raised to commercialize its micro LED display tech in the form of semiconductor chips as it aims to become a trailblazer in the $100B display industry.

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