display-technology
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Samsung Electronics
Samsung sells the screen in the living room, the phone in your hand and some of the silicon inside the wider digital economy. Its next act is to make that sprawling hardware empire behave like one connected AI system.
Lumiode, Inc.
Lumiode is a New York-based fabless semiconductor startup building truly-monolithic micro-LED microdisplays. By depositing low-temperature polycrystalline silicon (LTPS) thin-film-transistor backplanes directly onto LED epiwafers - skipping the wafer-bonding step used by most rivals - Lumiode produces ultra-high-brightness, low-power, small-form-factor displays aimed at augmented reality, head-up displays and projection. Spun out of Columbia University in 2012 and led by co-founder and acting CEO Ioannis (John) Kymissis, the company raised roughly $16 million in venture funding before agreeing in December 2025 to be acquired by Taiwan's PlayNitride.
Ioannis Kymissis
Ioannis (John) Kymissis is the Kenneth Brayer Professor and Chair of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University, where he directs the Laboratory for Unconventional Electronics (CLUE) and works on thin-film materials for displays and sensors. He is co-founder and acting CEO of Lumiode, a New York startup building high-brightness micro-LED microdisplays for augmented reality and wearables. A serial entrepreneur who has spun four companies out of his lab, he is a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, IEEE, Optica, and the Society for Information Display, and helped launch the Makerspace @ Columbia.
Light Field Lab, Inc.
Light Field Lab is a San Jose deep-tech company building SolidLight, a holographic display platform that projects three-dimensional objects into open space with no glasses, headsets, or eyewear required. Founded in 2017 by three veterans of the light-field camera company Lytro, it assembles self-emissive, bezel-less panels into modular video walls dense enough - roughly 10 billion pixels per square meter - to form images the eye reads as physically real. Backed by $85M including a $50M Series B with Bill Gates' Gates Frontier, Corning, LG, NCSOFT, and Samsung, and named to TIME's Best Inventions of 2022, the company is now productizing SolidLight for enterprise, entertainment, and public-display markets.
Nanosys
Nanosys is a Silicon Valley materials company, founded in 2001 in Milpitas, California, that makes quantum dots - man-made semiconductor crystals 2 to 8 nanometers across that convert light into precisely tuned, saturated color. Its Quantum Dot Enhancement Film (QDEF) helped bring wide-color-gamut displays to mass market, and its materials have shipped in more than 70 million televisions, monitors, tablets and phones. Nanosys holds one of the largest quantum dot patent portfolios in the world and is developing NanoLED (QDEL), a self-emissive display technology in which quantum dots make their own light. In September 2023 its quantum dot business was acquired by Japan's Shoei Chemical, which now operates the Nanosys brand and its Milpitas R&D labs.
Jennifer Aspell
Jennifer Aspell is the CEO of BrightView Technologies, a Durham, North Carolina optics company that engineers micro lens array films to shape and manage light for displays, AR/VR, automotive, LiDAR, sensing and LED lighting. An electrical engineer trained at Rensselaer, UC Berkeley and Purdue, she started out at Bell Laboratories building technology for long-haul optical networks before moving through Lucent, JDS Uniphase and Tyco Electronics. She took the helm of BrightView in 2010 after the recession gutted its original rear-projection-TV market, and rebuilt it into a global supplier serving more than 200 customers, capped by a $7M Series B in 2025 led by Forvia Hella and Technology Venture Partners.
Martin Devenney
Dr. Martin Devenney is the CEO of Nanosys, the world's leading quantum dot technology company now part of Shoei Chemical. A chemist-turned-manufacturer with a PhD from Queen's University Belfast and over 35 patents, he spent eight years scaling Nanosys's quantum dot production from lab curiosity to the backbone of more than 1,000 unique display products across 70 million consumer devices. Named CEO in May 2023, he then engineered the company's acquisition by Japanese chemical giant Shoei Chemical in September 2023, positioning Nanosys to lead the next generation of display technologies including NanoLED, QD-OLED, and automotive quantum dot applications.
Barmak Heshmat
Barmak Heshmat is an optical physicist and entrepreneur who founded Brelyon, a San Mateo-based startup creating Ultra Reality displays that generate immersive panoramic virtual screens without any headset. A former MIT Media Lab research scientist and onetime head of optics at Meta's AR division, Heshmat ranked in the top 1% of Iran's national university entrance exam, earned a PhD in optoelectronics from the University of Victoria, filed 8 patents, published 20 journal papers, and now leads a company backed by Lockheed Martin Ventures, LG Technology Ventures, and Corning after raising $18.8M total - solving the fundamental problem of why no one wants to wear a computer on their face.