poLight Announces $19M Investment, IPO Plans

Norwegian poLight AS has raised NOK 146m (~$19M) in a private placement for the next steps towards commercialization of poLight’s autofocus actuators for mobile phone cameras and represents a next step in the announced plan for an IPO. poLight planned to raise NOK 90-120 million in this round of financing. The over subscription enables the company to further accelerate its growth.

“poLight is on track for commercialization of its unique technology and is committed to the ambition of taking a leading role in the market for auto focus lenses used in mobile cameras”, says Øyvind Isaksen, CEO of poLight. poLight works with several potential customers and is in the process of establishing manufacturing capacity in a cooperation with ST Micro as a manufacturing partner. Volume production is planned to start in 2H of 2015.

poLight has a patented Tunable Optical Lens with many performance benefits compared to VCMs, and it is said to score far better in terms of instant focus and low power consumption. Combined with advanced image processing the poLight lens will create new mobile applications such as: Instant Focus enabling to bring the image in focus instantaneously; All in Focus which will allow the user to have all objects in-focus, from close to far; and full resolution Focus after the fact, which enables the user to refocus the picture long after taking it without losing image quality.

TLens Principle

1st ST Wafer with poLight AF