optics
(11)
Sportsman's Warehouse
How a single Utah outfitter turned camo, cartridges and reloading powder into a $1.2 billion business - and why its edge is the stuff Amazon can't ship.
Ziv Attar
Ziv Attar is the co-founder and CEO of Glass Imaging, a California startup building GlassAI, a neural image processing system that corrects optical aberrations and sensor imperfections to pull sharper, more detailed pictures out of small cameras. An optical engineer trained at the Technion, he founded LinX Imaging in 2011 and sold it to Apple in 2015, then led computational photography work at Apple including the Portrait Mode that shipped on the iPhone 7+. In 2025 Glass Imaging raised a $20M Series A led by Insight Partners.
Marvell Technology
Marvell Technology is a Santa Clara-based fabless semiconductor company that designs the chips underpinning modern data infrastructure. Founded in 1995, it has pivoted under CEO Matt Murphy from consumer and mobile silicon into custom AI accelerators (XPUs), electro-optics, high-speed Ethernet switching, DSPs and storage controllers. Its parts move data inside and between the hyperscale data centers run by companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet, making it one of the key merchant and custom silicon suppliers powering the AI buildout.
Matthias Hofmann
Matthias Hofmann is the co-founder and CEO of Eyebot, a Boston-based company building self-serve vision-test kiosks that deliver a 90-second refractive exam and pair users with a tele-optometrist. He holds a PhD in electrical engineering from Virginia Tech, did postdoctoral optics work at Harvard Medical School, and was an early engineer at MIT spinout EyeNetra before starting Eyebot in 2021 with Jack Moldave. In August 2025 Eyebot raised a $20M Series A led by General Catalyst.
Brelyon
Brelyon is an MIT Media Lab spin-out building headset-free immersive displays. Its Ultra Reality monitors use patented wavefront and light-field engineering to project a curved, multi-focal virtual image up to 122 inches with a ~110-degree field of view from a desktop-sized frame, giving users the depth and scale of VR without a headset. Brelyon targets simulation and training, control centers, teleoperations, enterprise visualization and high-end gaming.
Gene Dolgoff
Gene Dolgoff is the founder, CEO, CTO, and Chairman of Holobeam Technologies, a Long Island biotech building holographic tools to detect and treat cancer. He has been making holograms since 1964, holds over 65 patents worldwide, built the world's first LCD projector, and consulted with Gene Roddenberry on the concept that became the Star Trek Holodeck. Today his company is developing Holographic Energy Teleportation (HET), advanced nanoparticles, and a new class of MRI imaging - aiming, in his words, to teleport energy through the body to kill cancer cells.
Michael LaFramboise
Michael LaFramboise is the CEO and co-founder of Aurelius Systems, a San Francisco defense startup building autonomous, AI-guided laser turrets that detect and destroy drones at the speed of light for roughly pennies per shot. A Case Western engineer, Navy veteran, and ex-Coherent and Amazon Devices operator, he dropped out of a Columbia PhD in nano optical systems to build Archimedes, a low-cost directed-energy weapon. Aurelius raised a $10 million seed co-led by General Catalyst and Draper Associates in September 2025 and opened a U.S. manufacturing line for high-power fiber lasers in 2026, aiming to become America's domestic one-stop laser shop.
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.
Patrick Naulleau
Patrick Naulleau is the CEO of EUV Tech Inc., a Martinez, California-based company leading the development of at-wavelength extreme ultraviolet (EUV) metrology tools for semiconductor manufacturing. With over 25 years of pioneering work in EUV lithography — including helping build the world's first EUV scanner at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and co-developing the SHARP EUV mask microscope — Naulleau transitioned from world-class researcher to industry CEO in 2022. He holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan, is a Fellow of both Optica and SPIE, and has authored over 400 publications. EUV Tech raised a $36M Series A led by Intel Capital in 2023.
Yongwei Zhang
Yongwei Zhang is the CEO of Complete Genomics and MGI Americas, leading one of the most ambitious efforts to make whole-genome sequencing fast, accurate, and affordable at scale. With a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Johns Hopkins and dual bachelor's degrees from Tsinghua University, Zhang brings a rare blend of optics precision, software fluency, and entrepreneurial grit to the genomics frontier. He architected the DNBSEQ sequencing platform series now used by over 2,600 researchers in 100 countries, and has positioned Complete Genomics as a formidable challenger to Illumina's market dominance - at a fraction of the cost.
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.