VividQ Raises £11M to Bring Computer-Generated Holography to Cars, AR Headsets, and Everyday Screens

VividQ, a Cambridge-based deeptech company developing software and IP for computer-generated holography, has closed a seed extension round of £11 million, bringing its total funding to more than £17 million. The round was led by Innovation Platform (IPC) from the University of Tokyo, joined by Foresight Williams Technology (a joint venture between Foresight Group and Williams Advanced Engineering), Japanese Miyako Capital, Austrian APEX Ventures, and the R42 Group from Stanford, with earlier investors University of Tokyo Edge Capital, Sure Valley Ventures, and Essex Innovation also participating. The company will use the capital to scale its team, expand commercial operations in the Asia Pacific region, and advance three key applications of its holographic display technology.

VividQ was founded in 2017 by Darran Milne and Tom Durrant, two researchers who had spent years working on the fundamental algorithmic problems that had prevented computer-generated holography from becoming practical at consumer scale. Holography — creating the impression of true three-dimensional imagery in which different parts of the image appear at different distances from the viewer, with natural focus cues — had long been a goal for display technology. Films from Star Wars to Iron Man depicted seamless holographic interfaces as the natural endpoint of digital interaction. But making computer-generated holography work in real time on hardware that could be embedded in consumer devices had remained beyond reach, primarily because the computations required to generate a holographic wavefield were too intensive to run at usable frame rates on affordable silicon.

VividQ's core innovation is a set of algorithms and software architecture that dramatically reduces the computational load of real-time computer-generated holography, making it implementable on the kind of graphics processing hardware already used in consumer electronics. This unlocked three market applications the company is actively pursuing. The first is automotive head-up displays, where holography can project navigation information and safety alerts at a perceived depth that aligns naturally with the road ahead, reducing the visual dissonance of conventional flat HUDs. The second is augmented reality headsets and smart glasses, where computer-generated holography addresses the well-known vergence-accommodation conflict that causes eyestrain in current AR devices by projecting images with correct optical depth. The third is HoloLCD, VividQ's most commercially accessible product, which uses standard LCD panels combined with VividQ's algorithms to produce 3D holographic effects visible without glasses, targeting gaming laptops, automotive infotainment, and eventually mainstream consumer screens.

By the time of this raise, VividQ had already partnered with Arm to demonstrate the world's first mobile holographic display, and had established relationships with manufacturers in the US, China, and Japan including Compound Photonics and Himax Technologies. Hermann Hauser, co-founder of Arm and an advisor to APEX Ventures, provided a notable endorsement of the technology's potential to change how humans interact with digital information.

Sources

• TechCrunch — VividQ raises $15M (June 2021)
• VividQ — £11M round announcement (2021)
• EU Startups — VividQ raises £11M (July 2021)