After raising over 1 billion more, Kunyou Optoelectronics sprints towards mass production of 12-inch wafer-level optics

On October 10, wafer-level optical company Kunyou Optoelectronics announced that the company has recently received capital support and completed a C+ round of financing of over 1 billion yuan. This is another 100 million yuan in financing after the company completed hundreds of millions of yuan in round C financing earlier this year.

This financing of Kunyou Optoelectronics will be mainly invested in the upgrade of production lines and R&D capabilities. The most popular one is the 12-inch wafer-level optical production line built by the company in Shanghai Lingang with a total investment of 2 billion yuan.

The project is progressing steadily as planned and is expected to be completed in 2027, which will further consolidate Kunyou's R&D and mass production capabilities in the field of wafer-level optics and provide production capacity support for downstream application markets such as AR, fiber optics, optical communications, automotive optics and optical computing.

Kunyou Optoelectronics was founded in 2016 and is headquartered in Shanghai. The founder, Lin Tao, holds a PhD in optoelectronics from the University of Cambridge. The company adopts the IDM model and has built a full-process closed loop from design, master production to mass production and testing. The Lingang base has nearly 10,000 square meters of ultra-clean rooms.

At the commercial level, Kunyou’s three product lines have all achieved large-scale shipments. Among them, 3D sensing micro-nano optical components have been supplied to the world's first-tier mobile phone manufacturers since 2019, with tens of millions of units shipped in total, and have been extended to sweeping robots, smart door locks, drones and other scenarios;

Micro-nano optical fiber products have entered the domestic new energy vehicle lidar supply chain since 2021 and are further extending to high-speed optical modules;

AR diffraction optical waveguide is its core growth pole, leading the industry in domestic shipments, forming six product series covering resin, glass, silicon carbide and other material systems and from monochrome to full color. Among them, the latest generation of photolithography waveguides has been used in terminal products of internationally renowned Internet companies. Kunyou Optoelectronics estimates that the AR optical waveguide shipment target in 2026 will be more than 200,000 units, and will be deeply coupled with the Micro LED micro-display technology route.

According to the development path previously disclosed by Kunyou Optoelectronics, the company's short-term goal is to achieve the top three global market share of AR optical waveguides, promote the large-scale implementation of consumer-grade AR and launch an IPO; in the long-term, it hopes to build a full-stack technology platform and become an important player in the global consumer photonics, AR optics and automotive optics fields.