Imagia, a start-up based in Fremont, California, announced the close of a $4.5M seed round for evelopment and initial commercial deployment of the company’s first generation of flat, silicon-based optical lenses.
Imagia said its metalens technology can shrink an entire optical assembly into a planar, wafer-thin device, resulting in a dramatic reduction in size and complexity for optical assemblies. Using the patent-pending approach, Imagia can precisely pattern nanoscale structures directly onto various substrates, creating completely flat metalenses that steer light waves by design, and without the need for traditional curved lenses. The lenses can be square or round, and can be made as small as a single pixel on a digital display.
The metalenses can be built directly on top of CMOS devices like LEDs and image sensors in the same fabrication flow. Target applications include AR/VR headsets.
The funding was led by Gates Frontier and joined by MetaVC Partners and other strategic investors.
“Metamaterials are a true paradigm shift in the way we manipulate light,” says Greg Kress, CEO of Imagia, “akin to the shift from analog to digital computing. Traditional glass lenses have been around for hundreds of years. The inherent constraints of working with these types of lenses result in complex, bulky optical assemblies that require precise mechanical alignments. Imagia changes that approach by building lenses like integrated circuits, something that was not possible until very recently.”
“We are firm believers that the next generation of AR glasses will be powered by this kind of metalens technology,” says David Bonelli, Founder & CEO of Pulsar, the leading AR hardware and optics design firm behind Red6’s ATARS and NuEyes’s NuLoupes. Pulsar is now working in partnership with Imagia, exploring future applications for metalenses. “Imagia’s metalens technology promises to open up new frontiers in optical design that were previously impossible.”
