Lausanne-based AlphaLum today announced the close of its €3.6 million (CHF 3.4 million) Seed financing round to scale its optics and sensing platform for smart glasses.
The round was led by Vsquared Ventures. With this funding, the Swiss startup aims to accelerate its transition from R&D to becoming a technology supplier for smart glasses and spatial-computing product generation.
“AlphaLum is building foundational technology for one of the most important computing transitions ahead. Smart glasses are already a reality – the next step is to make them available at scale. AlphaLum is the player targeting the technological bottlenecks to enable this, and we are looking forward to partnering on this journey,” said Benedikt von Schoeler, General Partner at Vsquared Ventures.
AlphaLum was founded in 2025 as a spin-out from ams OSRAM’s corporate incubator, by Markus Rossi, who previously exited Heptagon as CIO to ams AG in 2017, and Tanja Koch. It develops high-efficiency holographic display optics and miniature sensing technologies for AR, MR, and spatial computing.
AlphaLum stated the recent developments in the smart glasses market highlight both the growing demand for AR products as well as structural bottlenecks preventing global scale. This view is underscored by Meta’s recent decision to pause the international expansion of its Ray-Ban Display smart glasses in the UK, France, Italy, and Canada, originally scheduled for early 2026. The waitlists now extend well into 2026, as the tech giant prioritises fulfilling demand in the US.
According to AlphaLum, the gap between demand and manufacturability has become a defining challenge for the sector. It blames the inefficient optical architectures and power-hungry sensing systems for limiting scalability beyond early launches.
The company claims to be addressing this challenge by enabling AR hardware to move from constrained pilot production to true mass manufacturing. It combines two integrated technologies: holographic optical combiners and ultra-low-power interferometric laser sensors, addressing the low efficiency of transparent displays and the high-power consumption of vision-based sensing.
“AlphaLum’s thin, invisible optical layer minimises light loss between the display and the human eye, delivering over 10× higher optical efficiency than conventional waveguides while significantly reducing system cost. Complemented by an AI-powered motion-sensing platform, the technology enables intuitive, hands-free AR interaction and high-resolution, distortion-free images—unlocking mass-market scalability that has so far remained out of reach,” AlphaLum explained in the press release.
The company states that its transparent displays are built on advanced Volume Phase Holograms (VPHs) designed and engineered in-house. It further mentions that, combined with machine-learning-enhanced signal interpretation, its SMI sensor delivers motion and distance sensing at a fraction of the power of traditional vision or 3D sensing systems. Self-Mixing Interferometry (SMI) is a laser-based optical sensing technique that directly encodes motion and distance into the laser signal itself.
Markus Rossi, CEO and co-founder of AlphaLum, said, “At AlphaLum, our goal is to make the next generation of smart glasses truly wearable – not as prototypes, but as scalable products. By solving the low efficiency of transparent display technologies and always-on constraints of vision-based sensing, we enable our partners to bring interactive, everyday AR to market at scale.
“With this round, we are preparing the next phase of industrialisation and strengthening our role as a core technology supplier for future smart glasses platforms.”
AlphaLum’s team includes professionals with experience in optics, AI, and industrial process design, pursuing a fabless model focused on IP, contract manufacturing, and product engineering.
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2026/01/lausanne-based-alphalum-raises-e3-6-million-to-build-missing-hardware-layer-mass-market-smart-glasses/
