Half Year Round Up - David Hayes, WaveOptics CEO

H1 2018

It has been a busy and rewarding first half of 2018. Our key focus is clear – to deliver what our customers need, so that they can  build Augmented Reality (AR) Wearables and smartglasses.  This will mean that WaveOptics waveguides (see-through displays) have the opportunity to be the key optical component to enable the AR market opportunity. We are confident we can achieve this. We have unparalleled manufacturing scalability and superior optical performance.

First impressions

I joined WaveOptics in September last year, and I spent my first few months meeting our customers and partners, and as you would expect, taking time to really understand the business.

We headed to CES in January, along with the rest of the Consumer Electronics Industry. It was a very inspiring few days – 40 meetings packing over the two days, great to see the team in action and experience such a positive response from our external stakeholders.

We have an amazing and talented team here at WaveOptics. Over 80% of our R&D team have PhDs and we have now more than doubled our headcount since December 2017, having hit 50 employees this month.  All of this growth to support  customer demand.

And we are continuing to hire.

What’s new over the last few months?

An updated commercial model:  We now have a clear commercial path for our customers – allowing them to develop prototypes and keep pace with our development cycles.

Key partnerships: We announced our partnership with Coretronic for projectors and agreed manufacturing partnerships with EV Group and Optics Balzers to underpin our fabless manufacturing strategy – this allows us to mass produce affordable waveguides to meet our customers’ demand.

Understanding AR Optics: AR Optics can be a complex topic – so we created 3 animations to help explain things.  These are focused on understanding AR Wearable Optics , our manufacturing process and the technology that powers our waveguides.

What’s next?

I am hugely optimistic about the future of AR and see WaveOptics as really well positioned to support our customers and the enabler for the wider ecosystem – we are ready for the next phase of growth.  AR is a fantastic market opportunity, widely considered to be the next big technological advancement.  It is not a case of if, just when.

David