Swave Photonics

Swave Photonics
Information
Industry	Fabless semiconductors, holographic displays
Founded	2022
Founder	Theodore Marescaux, Dmitri Choutov
Headquarters	Leuven, Belgium
Notable Personnel	Theo Marescaux (founder, interim CEO), Dmitri Choutov (founder, COO), Pieter Vorenkamp (chairman)
Products	Holographic eXtended Reality (HXR) spatial light modulator
Website	https://swave.io

Swave Photonics is a Belgian fabless semiconductor company that develops holographic display chips for augmented reality smart glasses. It was founded in 2022 as a spin-off of the research institute imec and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), and it is headquartered in Leuven, Belgium, with a second office in Redmond, Washington.

The company calls its technology Holographic eXtended Reality (HXR). Its core component is a spatial light modulator that uses phase-change material as the pixel, built on a standard CMOS semiconductor process, with a pixel pitch that Swave gives as less than 300 nm. Pixels that small can diffract light, which lets the chip form a holographic image with real depth instead of a pair of flat stereoscopic images. Swave presents this as a way to avoid the vergence-accommodation conflict and to do without the waveguides and varifocal lenses used in other AR displays. By mid-2025 Swave had raised more than 43 million euros, and in January 2026 it reported that it had begun delivering development kits to customers.

Reviewed 29 September 2026. Founding, leadership, funding rounds and investors, HXR technology claims, CES 2025 and CES 2026 demonstrations, and current leadership checked against the imec and Swave releases, the Swave About page, the CES 2026 awards entry and the cited press reports. About review dates.

History

Founding and seed funding

Swave announced its formation and a 7 million euro seed round on 28 June 2022. The round was co-led by imec.xpand and the Flanders Future Techfund (FFTF), with the Belgian inter-university fund QBIC also taking part. The founding CEO was Theodore Marescaux, who had previously worked at imec and at the display maker Barco; Dmitri Choutov, a semiconductor industry veteran who had worked at National Semiconductor, Maxim Integrated and Lam Research, joined him as co-founder and chief operating officer. The seed announcement said the technology had been developed at imec for more than five years, and it credited imec Fellow Xavier Rottenberg with the underlying concept. At that point the company planned two chip sizes, 2 cm by 2 cm for high-end displays and 0.5 cm by 0.5 cm for wearables, and expected first HXR chip samples in 2023. Its early targets were broad: AR, VR and mixed reality glasses, holographic walls, 3D gaming, video conferencing and automotive and aerospace head-up displays.

In November 2022 Swave named Mike Noonen as CEO, and Marescaux became chief product officer. Noonen had been CEO of the millimeter-wave chip company MixComm until its acquisition by Sivers Semiconductors in 2022, and he was a co-founder and chairman of the semiconductor incubator Silicon Catalyst. The same announcement named Pieter Vorenkamp as chairman of the board. A 3 million euro extension of the seed round followed in June 2023, which the company's later releases count as a 10 million euro seed round in total. SiliconANGLE listed Acequia Capital and Luminate NY among the seed investors alongside imec.xpand, FFTF and QBIC. Swave's website also reports a 2.1 million euro non-dilutive grant in 2023 and, in October 2023, a European Innovation Council award of a 2.5 million euro grant plus up to 15 million euros in equity.

HXR announcement and demonstrations

On 25 April 2024 Swave formally presented its HXR technology. The company said it used non-volatile phase-change material pixels on a standard CMOS process to reach true 3D holography "up to 64 gigapixels", announced a demonstration at Display Week in San Jose, and said development kits would reach customers in the second half of 2024. A month later it showed what it described as the first true-color 3D holographic display, using a subpixel arrangement for spatial color instead of three separate panels or fast color switching; its earlier prototypes had been monochrome.

At CES 2025 Swave showed a positive hologram projected onto paper, dual-plane images at near and far focus through a holographic optical element combiner, full-color output from red, green and blue lasers, and a real-time simulator that rendered dynamic depth on an FPGA at about 8 frames per second. Insight Media reported the modulator's pixel pitch as 0.25 microns and said Swave planned an ASIC on a 22 nm process. The company says it received a CES 2025 Innovation Award.

Series A and later funding

On 3 January 2025 Swave announced a 27 million euro Series A round co-led by imec.xpand and SFPIM Relaunch. New investors were the EIC Fund, IAG Capital Partners and Murata Electronics North America; existing investors Qbic Fund, PMV, imec and Luminate also took part. The money was earmarked for the HXR platform for AI-driven AR smart glasses and head-up displays. Choutov said at the time that silicon was running at Swave's partner fabs and that product development kits would come first, followed by production devices. optics.org reported that the company had hired Joel Kollin, formerly of Microsoft's HoloLens 2 team, as director of optical architecture.

A 6 million euro follow-on to the Series A, led by IAG Capital Partners with Samsung Ventures as a strategic investor, was announced on 25 June 2025. It followed the 10 million euro seed round and the 27 million euro Series A, and Jon Peddie Research reported that it brought the total capital raised to more than 43 million euros. The same day the company named Derek Jensen, who had earlier held corporate development roles at SK hynix, Magic Leap and GlobalFoundries, as chief financial officer.

Onyx modulator and development kits

Ahead of CES 2026, the HXR "Onyx" spatial light modulator was named a CES 2026 Innovation Awards honoree in the XR and Spatial Computing category. The CES entry describes a CMOS chip with a pixel pitch of less than 300 nm, intended for compact AI-driven smart glasses.

At CES 2026 Swave showed the dynamic modulator operating in public for the first time. According to Jon Peddie Research, the demonstration used a 256-million-pixel modulator split into four quadrants and red, green and blue lasers, and it switched focus between content across the room and content about 20 to 25 cm away. Hologram synthesis ran on an FPGA using Fourier transforms, and Swave described its own illumination-based method for reducing laser speckle. Noonen said customers were eager to receive the development kits they had ordered, and Jon Peddie Research reported that Swave had built about 18 kits, four of them already delivered, with the rest due over the following month; the longer-term plan was to move from the FPGA to an ASIC and to co-package the compute engine with the modulator.

As of September 2026 the company's website lists co-founder Theo Marescaux as interim CEO, Choutov as COO, Andrew Repton as vice president of engineering and Vorenkamp as chairman. Noonen is listed as an advisor. The site gives the team as more than 40 people, including 15 PhDs.

Funding

Date	Round	Amount	Investors (as announced)
June 2022	Seed	7 million euros	imec.xpand and FFTF (co-leads), QBIC
June 2023	Seed extension	3 million euros (seed total 10 million euros)	Not stated
January 2025	Series A	27 million euros	imec.xpand and SFPIM Relaunch (co-leads), EIC Fund, IAG Capital Partners, Murata Electronics North America, Qbic Fund, PMV, imec, Luminate
June 2025	Series A follow-on	6 million euros	IAG Capital Partners (lead), Samsung Ventures

Technology

A conventional AR display shows two flat images, one per eye, at a fixed focal distance. The eyes converge on virtual objects at different depths while still focusing at that one distance, which is the source of the vergence-accommodation conflict. A holographic display instead reconstructs the light wave of the scene, so each virtual object can be brought into focus at its own depth. Swave says its sub-300 nm pixels, which Jon Peddie Research describes as sub-wavelength, are small enough to shape and steer light in this way. The modulator uses a phase-change material, originally created for memory storage, to set each pixel's optical state.

Swave argues that building the modulator with low-cost, established CMOS chip technology gives it a cost-effective and scalable route to production, that the approach removes the need for waveguides and varifocal lenses, and that it is compatible with an eyeglass prescription. These are the company's own claims.

See also

• Holographic display
• Spatial light modulator
• Vergence-accommodation conflict
• VividQ
• Smart glasses