36 Krypton has learned that KunYou Optoelectronics has recently completed a new round of financing, followed by KunZhong Capital, Sunny Optical, as well as the previous round of investment institutions, ZhongHeng XingLight and ChenHui Venture Capital.
Currently, KunYou Optronics focuses on the development and production of three types of products:
Wafer-level optical and DOE devices in 3D depth imaging, especially for cell phone applications;
Optical waveguide modules for AR applications, especially grating-type waveguides based on wafer-level optics made with multi-stage pupil dilation for coupled light field and holographic AR imaging;
Inter-board and inter-chip wafer-level high-speed parallel optical links.
Strategic investor Sunny Optical is a Hong Kong listed company. Its products cover three areas: optoelectronic products, optical parts and optical instruments. Sunny Optics is rooted in many segments of the optoelectronics industry, providing optical solutions for Google, Qualcomm, Bosch, Samsung, HP, Sony, Zeiss, Xiaomi and others. Sunny also provides solutions for global high-tech companies in new tracks such as VR, AR, and drones.
Wu Zishuo, Founding Partner of KunZhong Capital, said that in an environment where the market is focusing on top-level innovation at a high level of fervor, the physical layer further down the line is also nurturing huge and far-reaching changes. The joint investment with Sunny Optics in KunYou Optoelectronics is based on the recognition of the KunYou team and the thinking of innovative changes in the cornerstone field of integrated electronics and integrated light:
First, from the general trend, the past 70 years, is the era of semiconductors and integrated circuits; from a single transistor to the evolution of integrated circuits, directly contributed to the outbreak of the human information revolution, creating countless scientific and technological miracles. And as engineering & ldquo; Opto-electromechanical computing & rdquo; one of the four major areas of the optical field, the commercial volume in recent history, but less than the electricity of a million. One of the reasons for this is that the marginal cost of the innovation of electricity along Moore's Law is lower than the basis for reconstructing light. But today, this logic is being challenged, it is the path of Moore's law, the history of integrated circuits is drawing a perfect S curve towards the ceiling. Along with the bottleneck of electricity, & ldquo; integrated electricity & rdquo; inevitably to & ldquo; integrated light & rdquo; change.
Secondly, from the logic of productization feasibility considerations, the realization of innovation needs to be accompanied by the landing of mass production process. KunYou Optoelectronics is exploring the integration of semiconductor/wafer level process, and optical process, to practice a new path. The traditional optical process is the so-called cold optical process, with scale and precision limited to the sub-millimeter and micron level; meanwhile, semiconductor process, as a masterpiece of human science and technology, has accumulated countless amazing micro-processes and large-scale mass production processes. Therefore, from the logic of productization, KunYou Optronics has not reconstructed the optical process, but borrowed the experience of the semiconductor field to make nanometer-sized optical components with the idea of semiconductor wafers, but at the same time through the wafer-level ideas to improve efficiency and reduce costs.
Again, from the logic of commercialization, the ideal technological innovation should not subvert the stock as a business model, but should be to seek incremental, innovative scenarios and needs, with new needs as the entry point. Wafer-level optics happen to make a series of new types of practical needs possible, including 3D imaging and face recognition, AR/MR, 5G optical communication links, medical imaging, intelligent industry and so on. Even some of the popular & ldquo;electric & rdquo; areas, may also be able to use wafer-level optics thinking another way. Take the hot artificial intelligence as an example, when everyone is practicing higher and stronger algorithms, photon can easily parallelize the processing of convolutional operations, which can not be reached by the electronic. KUNYO hopes to design and realize innovative optoelectronic products and application scenarios through wafer-level optical processes. KunYou focuses on nano-scale precision; Cold Optics focuses on sub-millimeter and micrometer scale precision. The two kinds of precision and two kinds of needs can complement and promote each other.
After this round of financing, the company's cumulative financing amounted to nearly 100 million yuan. As for the team, the core R&D team and management of KunYou Optronics come from professors and PhDs from Stanford University, University of Rochester, University of Cambridge, Zhejiang University and other optoelectronic institutes; and former executives from Microsoft, NASA, Fortis Fiber Optics, Sorepak, McKinsey, and other international companies.
