nanomaterials
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DigiLens Inc.
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.
Ben Hernandez
Ben Hernandez is the founder and CEO of Numat, a Chicago deep-tech company that treats chemistry like software. Numat designs metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), nanoscale materials that capture, hold, and even destroy specific molecules with atomic precision. Trained as an engineer with a law degree and an MBA, and a former private equity investor, Hernandez turned a Northwestern lab idea into the world's first industrial-scale MOF manufacturing campus, powering safer hazardous-gas storage for the semiconductor industry through its ION-X product and pushing toward industrial decarbonization.
Rui Jing
Rui Jing Jiang is the Founder and CEO of Avisi Technologies, a Redwood City-based clinical-stage medical device company developing VisiPlate, the world's thinnest freestanding ophthalmic implant for treating glaucoma. Built on University of Pennsylvania nanotechnology, VisiPlate is a multichannel aqueous shunt composed of alumina and Parylene-C that is 20 times thinner than a human hair. Rui Jing co-founded the company in 2017 as a junior at Penn's Wharton School, won the $100,000 President's Innovation Prize in 2018, secured FDA Investigational Device Exemption approval in October 2025 for the US SAPPHIRE trial, and closed a $10.7M Series A in February 2026 to advance pivotal clinical development.
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.