The acquisition of PxE—details of which were not disclosed—makes sense for Metalenz. The company launched publicly in 2021 and pioneered the commercialization of metasurfaces, a flat-lens system with nanostructures that bend light, reducing the need for multiple lens elements over the camera sensor while also capturing more light. The company has shipped more than 300 million of these metasurface optics to consumer devices today.
The technology can also capture polarization data, and Metalenz is working with Qualcomm to create a more effective, secure facial biometric authentication system for Android called Polar ID to rival Apple’s Face ID, expected to arrive on consumer devices at the end of 2027.
Rob Devlin, Metalenz CEO and cofounder, tells WIRED that PxE’s approach mirrors his own company’s by patterning microscopic structures directly onto an image sensor to unlock light data that conventional camera systems throw away.
“Apple, Samsung, Google—everyone is fighting to improve the visible camera every year, right?” Devlin says. “A lot of what they’re doing is investing hundreds of millions of dollars into software to try to somehow improve it, but the downside of that is that once information is lost when you’re absorbing all of that light, you can’t really buy it back, even if you’re throwing all of the software into the world at it.”
Low-light photography and night-time video capture could see dramatic improvements with the HoloCoder system. In high-contrast scenes—like taking a selfie in front of a bright window—the sensor can capture more light and better re-create the scene without blowing out highlights or drowning shadows in noise.
PxE’s technology isn’t on the market yet, but as Metalenz has already developed a supply chain, processed an image pipeline, and set up machine learning algorithms on how to take advantage of these new data streams, Devlin thinks PxE’s HoloCoder will be able to fit neatly into its platform and “completely disrupt” the visible sensing market. While the HoloCoder functions as a diffractive optic rather than a true metasurface, Devlin says Metalenz has already replicated the technology in the lab using its own metasurface optics.
“It’s really then bringing all of that information together through a single approach,” Devlin says. “We would do a metasurface design where now from a single image sensor, you’re getting all of the information that is in light: You’re getting polarization, you’re getting color without filtering, and you’re getting this depth channel. It’s like the one sensor to rule them all.”