7 March, 2020 - 00:25 By Kate Sweeney

VividQ, a deep tech software company with a base in Cambridge, fought off competition from hundreds of scale-ups to be named Best British Technology Pioneer 2020.

The competition, organised by KPMG’s Emerging Giants practice, saw regional pitching competitions take place in across the UK to find 16 outstanding scaleup businesses which are doing something truly disruptive in the technology space.

VividQ, founded in 2017 boasts world-leading expertise in 3D holography and has over 60 expert engineers, mathematicians and computer scientists from the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford and St Andrews.

The business has solved key technology barriers in the adoption of holographic display for mass commercial application. It currently offers patented software to enable the adoption of holographic display in AR/VR headsets/smartglasses, automotive head-up displays, and consumer electronics. The company is planning to have 10 million products in circulation by 2023.

Bina Mehta who chairs KPMG’s Emerging Giants Centre of Excellence said: “VividQ is an exciting business, with a very strong team of highly skilled people behind them and fast growth potential.

“They stood out from the crowd for creating a technology which is highly commercial and doing something really innovative and different. The judges were impressed with their potential to scale their business and their international aspirations and concluded they had a good chance at becoming a future unicorn.

“They are fantastic representatives of what is coming out of the UK’s tech community, which is consistently producing these hidden gems who are doing great things.”

In January 2020 VividQ partnered with Compound Photonics US Corporation (CP), a leading provider of compact high-resolution microdisplays for Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR) applications.

The collaboration brings to the market solutions for productising high image quality, real-time holographic display, to accelerate the adoption of AR/MR devices across a range of industrial and consumer applications.The union was borne out of the need for new high performance, integrated hardware and software solutions for holographic display, designed specifically for AR/MR applications.

VividQ and CP will work closely to overcome the constraints and meet the requirements that will be demanded to enable future AR products to break into the consumer market.

AR devices making use of these CP/VividQ solutions will give end users the ultimate 3D visual experience, solving many of the major issues in AR today such as eye-fatigue and the vergence-accommodation conflict (VAC). These solutions will provide sufficiently bright images at low power and reduce the overall size and weight of future headset designs.

The results of the collaboration were unveiled at SPIE AR/VR/MR in San Francisco last month where the first complete demonstrator of a holographic AR headset was presented.

Constructed by VividQ and powered by its software, with the phase LCoS microdisplay subsystem and integration support from Compound Photonics, the demonstrator headset gave companies interested in leveraging holographic technology in their products a first hand look at the superior capabilities of real-time, high quality holographic display for their target applications.

Yiwan Wong, CEO of Compound Photonics said: “We are extremely excited about this collaboration with VividQ which demonstrates to the industry the feasibility of a high quality 3D holographic display system for future AR headsets.”

Darran Milne, CEO and co-founder of VividQ, said: “We are excited to work with Compound Photonics to accelerate the adoption of 3D holographic display. At VividQ we believe that the close integration of hardware and software across the AR ecosystem is necessary to deliver the best solutions to the market and in Compound Photonics we found a partner that shares this vision. The AR headset demonstrator presented at SPIE AR/VR/MR is a revolutionary piece of technology showcasing the results of our collaboration to date.”

VividQ raised an additional £2.4m ($3.1m) from FluxUnit – OSRAM Ventures, the University of Tokyo Edge Capital (UTEC) and existing angel investors in December 2019. The two international VC funds joined Sure Valley Ventures, an entrepreneur-led Venture Capital fund based in the UK and Ireland, which led the initial closing of the round with £1m ($1.3m) investment earlier in the year.

Holographic displays powered by VividQ’s software are implemented by Original Equipment Manufacturers in the US, China, and Japan, in applications ranging from AR smartglasses to automotive head-up displays.

The company says its mission is to enable the next big revolution in the display industry and that the funding secured at the back end of 2019 will enable VividQ to accelerate the adoption of its software in the next generation of consumer electronics, and scale up the number of integration projects with chipmakers and micro-displays manufacturers. The company expects the first holographic devices powered by VividQ to be released in this year.

Darran Milne said: “Holography will revolutionise the way in which we view and interact with the world in the most fundamental way. For the first time, holographic display can be in the hands of everyone, across hundreds of applications, thanks to the extraordinary capabilities provided through VividQ’s software. With two renowned deep tech VCs like Fluxunit and UTEC on board, we are looking to bring about this holographic reality much faster.”

Alexander Meyer-Scharenberg, Investment Manager at Fluxunit, said: “We are very excited about our investment into VividQ and to work with a highly talented team from Cambridge – one of the leading hubs for AR and holography worldwide.VividQ’s software will be the enabler for real-time computer-generated holography, leapfrogging smart glasses and in-car head-up displays. Offering a more natural viewing experience for drivers, holography will be vital for next generation user interfaces and entertainment systems.”

Ted Yamamoto, Partner at UTEC, said: “We are very excited to work with VividQ, the team comprised of the world’s brightest team in the field of computer-generated holography. Holography is the pinnacle of 3D display technologies, but hasn’t penetrated the mass market since Gábor invented it 70+ years ago. Now is the time for holographic technology to lead the AR/VR industry and VividQ is leading this innovation. ”