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.
DigiLens is a Silicon Valley optics company that designs, manufactures, and licenses holographic waveguide displays - the transparent, printed lenses that let augmented reality smartglasses overlay digital information onto the real world. Founded in 2003 as SBG Labs around a switchable Bragg grating technology, the company pairs its proprietary CrystalClear photopolymer with an inkjet-printing and holographic contact-copy process it argues can scale AR optics to consumer price points. Alongside licensing its optics to manufacturers, DigiLens builds ARGO, a standalone AR/XR smartglasses platform aimed at enterprise and industrial workers, and counts Samsung, Sony, Continental, and Niantic among its investors.
Maggie McCullough is the CEO and founder of PolicyMap, the Philadelphia-based mapping and data-visualization platform she launched in 2008. A former White House budget-office staffer turned housing researcher, she built PolicyMap after struggling to fit maps and data into her own policy work, betting that anyone should be able to make a map as easily as they shop online. The platform now serves universities, banks, health systems, nonprofits and governments, layering thousands of public and proprietary datasets into one searchable map. In December 2023 the company closed a $3 million Series A led by its former parent, the Reinvestment Fund.