WaveOptics, a UK startup that builds waveguide-based optics — technology based on hologram physics and photonic crystals — for augmented reality hardware, has raised $16 million (£12 million) to help build the next phase of its business.
The Series B round of funding — which comes from previous investors Octopus Ventures, Touchstone Innovations plc and Robert Bosch Venture Capital GmbH; along with new investor Gobi Ventures (the prolific VC firm out of China that also manages one of Alibaba’s entrepreneur funds) — is one of biggest of the year for AR startups out of Europe, and comes on the heels of significant business wins for WaveOptics.
Sumanta Talukdar, who co-founded the company with David Grey, confirmed to me in an interview that WaveOptics is working with some significant, large tech companies on AR hardware, beyond products with its strategic investor, Bosch. (For the record, he laughed but also declined to comment when I straight-out asked if those companies included Apple and Google.) The first products, he added, are likely to hit the market next year and are aimed at both the consumer and enterprise markets.
He also declined to give me a valuation for his company. Notably, when I saw WaveOptics pitch at a London event last year (at Pitch@Palace), the company touted its significantly more modest budget when compared to some others in the AR field: and in fact prior to this Series B it had just raised only around $400,000.
Magic Leap, as one comparison, has raised $1.4 billion; and enterprise-focused Daqri has disclosed $15 million in funding, but we and others have heard through the grapevine that it’s secretly been raising significantly more and is now valued at $1 billion. Both are building hardware, so that is one reason for the higher numbers overall.
Indeed, we’ve seen a number of AR firms come to market building vertically integrated solutions covering both the software and hardware stacks, as well as software and apps that create experiences based on the basics of AR as currently works in existing hardware (such as Blippar, which also happens also be an investor in WaveOptics). What WaveOptics focuses on is something in between these two.
The company is building optics technology that can be used across different hardware, which it believes could change the rulebooks for…