Brelyon Raises $15 Million Series A to Forge New Metaverse Experiences That Go Beyond Headsets

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Sep 20, 2022, 09:02 ET

World-class investors join Brelyon's investment round to reimagine the future of work and play
Inventor of the world's first no-headset virtual monitor with monocular depth
Financing to accelerate product development and hiring driven by rapidly growing enterprise and consumer demand

SAN MATEO, Calif., Sept. 20, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Brelyon, the MIT spin-off pioneering a new category of ultra-immersive display technology to enable access to the metaverse, today announced it has raised $15 million in Series A financing led by Lockheed Martin Ventures and the MIT-affiliated E14 Fund with participation from Corning Incorporated, LG Technology Ventures, UDC Ventures (the corporate venture arm of Universal Display Corporation), and Franklin Templeton.

Brelyon, the MIT spin-off pioneering a new category of ultra-immersive display technology to enable access to the metaverse, announced it has raised $15 million in Series A financing led by Lockheed Martin Ventures and the MIT-affiliated E14 Fund with participation from Corning Incorporated, LG Technology Ventures, UDC Ventures (the corporate venture arm of Universal Display Corporation), and Franklin Templeton.

With the company's patented light-field technologies, Brelyon's Ultra Reality™ uses precise wavefront engineering to create a massive field of view with true optical depth layers, generating an immersive panoramic virtual screen that engulfs the viewer without the need for a headset, and all in a small desktop footprint. In doing so, Brelyon facilitates a desktop metaverse experience, enabling new types of immersive applications like gaming, simulation, and virtual offices, meeting rooms, events, and collaboration spaces.

"With Ultra Reality™, Brelyon is introducing a new perspective on the future of work and play, while forging new inroads as an immersive portal to metaverse experiences," said Barmak Heshmat, CEO and Founder of Brelyon. "For our Series A, we looked for world-class investors who share Brelyon's vision and bring a depth of experience in scaling cutting-edge technology. The rise of GPUs and efficient graphic neural nets in computer graphics is enabling an array of computational optics in displays and making them more accessible to the mass market. This opens the possibility to provide immersive services far superior to 32" desktop monitors and headsets today."

Brelyon's Ultra Reality™ is sparking demand from a growing roster of strategic partners worldwide that include enterprise and consumer brands from Fortune 500 and multinational companies across a range of industries for gaming, financial, productivity and industrial applications.

"Brelyon's computational optics technology presents an opportunity to develop, modernize and advance our capabilities in a digital environment," said Chris Moran, Vice President and General Manager of Lockheed Martin Ventures. "Their virtual and multi-depth display has the potential to provide the U.S. and our allies a competitive advantage with 21st century navigation and visualization technologies."

Built upon groundbreaking research from MIT, Brelyon is pioneering a set of technologies that leverage computational optics to provide immersion. One of the first results of these technologies is realization of virtual displays which manipulate the light to allow the viewer a window-like experience with extended meters of depth.

"As the pioneer of an entirely new generation of display technology, Brelyon is opening up tremendous possibilities for new types of form factors and applications," said Calvin Chin, Managing Partner at E14 Fund. "With its partnership program and Ultra Reality^™ now on the market, Brelyon is already working with industry-leading customers on a variety of use cases that transform user experiences now and into the future."

"Brelyon has a completely new take on metaverse and virtual worlds," said Anshul Agarwal, Managing Director at LG Technology Ventures. "Unlike conventional wisdom that is focused on binocular 3D and holograms, Brelyon's approach is to leverage depth to push on visual and functional performance in the virtual domain. This opens the door to visual experiences that have orders of magnitude better fidelity at significantly lower computational cost."

"We are excited to be an early supporter of Brelyon and their impressive technology that is helping to expand the OLED ecosystem deeper into the metaverse and creating more use cases for premium immersive display technology," said Josh Epstein, Managing Partner at UDC Ventures.

Brelyon launched Ultra Reality™ in January at CES, where the company also announced its partnership with LG Display.

ABOUT BRELYON

Headquartered in San Mateo, CA, Brelyon is a technology pioneer in hardware and software technologies for headset-less immersive experiences. Helmed by a founding team of scientists and industry executives from MIT, UCF, DARPA and IMAX, Brelyon has developed the world's first no-headset display technology with monocular depth. Companies interested in joining Brelyon's early access partner program, please visit www.brelyon.com

SOURCE Brelyon