Boulder, CO · Deep Tech · Est. 2020
Tynt makes glass change its mind.
A film that turns any window from crystal-clear to full blackout in ten seconds - then forgets it ever needed power.
A film that turns any window from crystal-clear to full blackout in ten seconds - then forgets it ever needed power.
It is a bright afternoon in Boulder, and somewhere on a lab bench a pane of ordinary-looking glass is doing something ordinary glass has never done. A whisper of voltage - less than a single volt, less than a AA battery could spare - runs across its surface. In under ten seconds the glass darkens from perfectly clear to a deep, even black. Then the current reverses, the black melts away, and the pane is transparent again, as if nothing happened.
No dye. No liquid crystal fog. No slow, bruise-blue crawl that makes conventional smart windows look like they are thinking too hard. What happened instead is closer to alchemy with a receipt: a microscopic layer of metal was plated onto the glass, then dissolved back into ions you cannot see. That is the whole company in a sentence. Tynt Technologies has taught glass to change its mind.
Most smart glass changes color by shuffling ions through a coating - reliable, but slow, and prone to a haze that optical engineers politely call "not ideal." Tynt threw out the color-changing chemistry and reached for something more literal. Apply a voltage, and metal plates out of a proprietary bi-metallic electrolyte onto the surface, blocking light. Reverse it, and the metal dissolves into ions so small they vanish. It is a switch, not a stain.
A sub-1-volt charge plates a thin, even metal film across the glass. Light dims fast and neutral - no color cast.
The system is bi-stable. Once set, it keeps any tint level - blackout to bright - without drawing another watt.
Flip the polarity and the metal dissolves back into invisible ions. The glass returns to clarity. Repeat, indefinitely.
Neutral, low-haze, fast tint built for AR displays and smart glasses, where a blue smudge over the world simply will not do. This is the near-term wedge - and the reason the "wearables" comes before "windows."
Dynamic glazing for facades and homes that dials in shade on demand and saves energy without a continuous power draw. Comfort and privacy, minus the utility bill guilt.
A seamless clear-to-opaque transition for glass walls and partitions. One tap and the meeting room disappears from view.
Beyond dimming, Tynt can switch to reflective states with customizable metallic hues - a mirror when you want one, a window when you don't.
The science did not begin as a company. It began as research in the group of Professor Mike McGehee - a materials scientist who spent eighteen years at Stanford chasing better solar cells and smart windows before bringing the work to the University of Colorado Boulder. Two of his PhD students, Tyler Hernandez and Michael Strand, both National Science Foundation fellows, kept pulling on the same thread: what if you controlled light with metal instead of chemistry?
In 2020 the thread became Tynt. Hernandez took the CEO seat and, in 2023, a spot on the Forbes 30 Under 30. McGehee stayed on as Chief Scientist. John Dwyer - a veteran of Katerra, Flex, Motorola, and Honeywell - joined to run operations and product. Seven of the company's patents are licensed directly from Stanford and CU Boulder; the other sixteen-plus were built in-house.
The money followed the physics. An $8.5 million seed round in 2021 - including a $1.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy - was followed by roughly $7 million more in 2023, and about the same again reported in 2024. All told, some $18.6 million, from climate-minded funds like Prime Impact, Starlight, Kompas, and Azolla, plus CU's own Buff Gold Ventures.
What they are buying is not a window. It is a platform - a film that laminates onto glass or plastic, rigid or flexible, and adapts a surface to its moment. The bet is that "adaptive" beats "static" everywhere light lands, and that speed and neutral optics are the qualities the incumbents never quite nailed.
Co-inventor of RME. Forbes 30 Under 30 (2023). NSF Graduate Fellow.
Co-inventor of the core electrodeposition chemistry. NSF Graduate Fellow.
CU Boulder professor; 18 years at Stanford in materials for windows & solar.
Ex-Katerra, Flex, Motorola, Honeywell. Runs operations and product.
Investors: Prime Impact Fund · Starlight Ventures · Kompas VC · Azolla Ventures · Buff Gold Ventures · U.S. Dept. of Energy. Total reported: ~$18.6M.
Tynt Technologies founded, spinning RME research out of the McGehee group.
$8.5M seed announced to commercialize blackout dynamic windows; DOE BENEFIT grant included.
CEO Tyler Hernandez named to Forbes 30 Under 30.
$7.07M seed extension led by returning investors Starlight and Prime Impact.
~$7.1M in additional seed reported; total funding reaches roughly $18.6M.
Return, for a moment, to that bright Boulder afternoon. The pane on the bench darkens, clears, darkens again - a small, undramatic loop that most people would walk right past. But scale that loop up and it stops being a lab trick. It becomes an office wall that goes private on cue, a pair of AR glasses that dims to meet the sun instead of squinting at it, a building that shades itself and quietly shaves its energy bill.
Ordinary glass just sits there, taking whatever the light gives it. The pane Tynt is building talks back. That is the change - not a flashier window, but a surface that finally has an opinion about the light passing through it.
Facts drawn from public sources including tynt.io, U.S. Dept. of Energy, Forbes, BizWest, and Crunchbase. Figures approximate.