MicroVision®

There is a certain type of company that is always about to matter. MicroVision, founded in 1993 and public on NASDAQ since 1996, has spent much of its life in that category. It has a genuinely clever core technology - MEMS-based laser beam scanning, which is the unglamorous art of aiming a laser very precisely using a mirror smaller than a grain of rice - and it has spent thirty years looking for the market that would finally pay for it at scale.

For a while the answer looked like projection. MicroVision built PicoP, an ultra-miniature scanning engine that could throw an image from something the size of a matchbook, and it showed up in pico-projectors and micro-display gadgets. That was a real business, but not a giant one. The interesting thing about a laser-scanning engine, though, is that if you can point a beam out at the world and measure how long it takes to come back, you are no longer making a projector. You are making lidar.

So MicroVision did the thing that keeps deep-tech companies alive: it aimed the same capability at a bigger problem. The bigger problem, circa the late 2010s, was that a lot of machines wanted to move by themselves - cars, forklifts, robots, drones - and cameras alone were not good enough at answering the question how far away is that thing. Lidar answers that question in three dimensions, and MicroVision already knew how to steer a beam.

Lidar had a bubble. In the late 2010s and early 2020s, dozens of lidar names went public, many through SPACs, on the promise that self-driving cars were imminent. The cars were not imminent. The bubble deflated, and a lot of those companies are gone or gutted.

MicroVision's response was to go shopping. It absorbed lidar assets from Ibeo in 2023, then in early 2026 acquired technology from Scantinel Photonics and from Luminar - two names from the boom. When a hype cycle collapses, the companies with cash and patience buy the wreckage. Attrition became a product line.

The company frames its current era as "Lidar 2.0": the right portfolio at the right performance at the right price. Note the word price. The first generation of lidar answered "can it work." The second has to answer "can anyone afford it at volume." That is the wall every deep-tech company eventually hits, and it is the one MicroVision is now leaning against.

Leadership reflects the shift. In September 2025, Glen DeVos moved from chief technology officer to chief executive - a signal that the hard part left is execution, not invention. It is an unglamorous mandate: turn a 30-year patent moat into recurring revenue.