Helio steps up product design with $4.75m investment

By Nicky Godding

3 March 2022

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Helio Display Materials has raised $4.75 million of Series A finance in a round led by Longwall Venture Partners and BGF. The investment is driving a significant expansion of the team and a move to custom-built labs at the Wood Centre for Innovation in Oxford.

Simon Jones, CEO, said: “Helio is on a mission to use our world-leading perovskite science to step up the performance and efficiency of displays. This fund raising marks a change of gear for Helio, enabling us to significantly grow our capacity to design products and engage with partners in the display supply chain. I would like to thank and acknowledge our enormously supportive investors who share our vision of a bright future for perovskites in displays.”

Helio is the first joint spin-out from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge having been co-founded by Prof. Henry Snaith of Oxford and Prof. Sir Richard Friend of Cambridge.

They licensed key early patents from the universities and are currently expanding this portfolio with their own technological developments and invention of new materials.

Their technologies are based on the use of innovative new materials built around metal halide perovskites. These materials are outstanding semiconductors which can be synthesized from low-temperature solution processes using earth abundant precursor materials. They take advantage of their exceptional high light absorption coefficients and emission efficiencies, as well as their extraordinary colour tunability, for applications as light emitters.

By Nicky Godding

Nicky Godding is editor of The Business Magazine. Before her journalism career, she worked mainly in public relations moving into writing when she was invited to launch Retail Watch, a publication covering retail and real estate across Europe.

After some years of constant travelling, she tucked away her passport and concentrated on business writing, co-founding a successful regional business magazine. She has interviewed some of the UK’s most successful entrepreneurs who have built multi-million-pound businesses and reported on many science and technology firsts.

She reports on the region’s thriving business economy from start-ups, family businesses and multi-million-pound corporations, to the professionals that support their growth and the institutions that educate the next generation of business leaders.