She runs a company that builds lenses you will never see - the films that decide how light reaches your eyes.
Open a laptop, slip on a headset, glance at a car's instrument cluster, and somewhere in the stack of glass and plastic there is a thin optical film doing quiet, deliberate work - spreading light evenly, sharpening a beam, killing a glare. That film is the business Jennifer Aspell has spent more than a decade building.
As CEO of BrightView Technologies in Durham, North Carolina, Aspell leads a company that engineers micro lens arrays - tiny, precisely shaped optical structures printed onto film at high volume. Their job is to shape and manage both visible and non-visible light: enhancing brightness, controlling the angle it travels, and making it land with uniformity. The customers are the world's leading tech companies. The product is, by design, invisible to the people who use it.
BrightView's films now turn up across displays and mini-LED backlights, AR/VR headsets, automotive lighting and instrument panels, LiDAR and 3D sensing, and LED lighting. Aspell calls the whole category visual intelligence - the layer where the digital and physical worlds meet, and where light has to be told exactly what to do.
In early 2025 the company closed a $7 million Series B, led by automotive supplier Forvia Hella and Technology Venture Partners. The money is going into market expansion, faster R&D, and a meaningful jump in production capacity. For a deep-tech optics company that makes physical things in a real factory, that last part matters most.
Be lean, be agile, and be ready - because the unexpected will happen.
BrightView started in 2002, built on intellectual property licensed out of Duke University. Its first bet was on rear-screen projection televisions - a market that looked enormous right up until it wasn't. The company raised roughly $30 million before 2008. Then the Great Recession arrived and flat panels ate the projection-TV market whole.
In 2010, Richmond-based Tredegar Corporation acquired what was left, and Aspell came in as CEO. She did not get a clean slate so much as a pile of optical know-how and manufacturing equipment looking for a reason to exist. Her answer was to stop chasing a single product and start treating BrightView as an optics-engineering company that could point its technology at whatever market needed light bent next.
That reframing is the whole story. The same roll-to-roll film process that once fed TVs now feeds displays, headsets, sensors and headlights. When COVID-19 hit, the company proved the point in the bluntest possible way: it used its existing materials and equipment to start manufacturing PPE, including face shields - and kept hiring through the pandemic.
By 2022, the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Manufacturing Extension Partnership had named BrightView a "Hero in Manufacturing," and the company had crossed 50 employees and more than 200 customers. Aspell's read on all of it is unsentimental: "the best-laid plans can be undone at a moment's notice."
Our team's work is enabling the next generation of products for the world's leading tech companies.
Aspell did not stumble into optics. She has been bending light, in one form or another, for her entire career - it just used to travel down a glass fiber instead of through a film.
Began at one of the most storied research labs in the world, developing technology for long-haul optical networks - the backbone fiber that moves data across continents.
Moved from the bench into business and executive roles, specializing in commercializing high-growth, emerging technologies - the unglamorous work of turning a lab breakthrough into a product someone will buy.
Rebuilds a recession-battered startup into a global optics supplier. Holds several patents, authored numerous publications, and now sits on the ECSE Advisory Council at her alma mater, RPI.
"That funding has fueled our market expansion, accelerated R&D, and enabled significant increases in production capacity."
"The best-laid plans can be undone at a moment's notice."
Where it started - and where she returned, now serving on the Electrical, Computer & Systems Engineering Advisory Council.
Deepened the technical foundation that would later let her run a company on the science, not just the spreadsheet.
The business half of a rare pairing: an engineer who can read the optics and the cap table with equal fluency.
For someone whose product is precision-engineered light, Aspell's downtime is refreshingly analog. She keeps a beach house and kayaks the coastal marshes nearby, where the company is ospreys, egrets and deer rather than venture partners.
She took up pickleball and describes it, with the dry honesty of someone who has run a hardware company through a recession and a pandemic, as "oddly therapeutic." And she's a regular at The Boot Room in Durham for trivia nights - usually alongside friends and her grown children. It is a small, telling detail: the CEO of a global optics firm, still showing up to argue about trivia answers on a weeknight.
Aspell's stated ambition for BrightView is blunt: to become a dominant player in the world of visual intelligence - the optical layer behind AR/VR, autonomous driving, 3D displays, LiDAR and sensing. The Series B is the down payment on that. The factory is where it gets proven. And the philosophy she'd hand her younger self - lean, agile, ready - is the operating manual for a company betting that the next wave of devices will need light shaped in ways nobody has manufactured at scale yet.
Sources: GrepBeat (2022, 2025), Electronic Design Women in Science & Engineering, RPI ECSE Advisory Council, BrightView Technologies, The Org, Crunchbase. Facts drawn from public reporting; where uncertain, omitted.