beeOLED was founded in November 2020 supported by an Exist grant of 0.9m€ to develop an efficient and long lasting stable deep-blue OLED emitter to improve displays in phones, tablets, laptops, and TVs. In December 2021, the company secured a 2.7m€ seed round from HTGF and M Ventures, the corporate VC of Merck. In September 2022, a seed round extension was raised from TGFS and JBN-Invest. The company recently raised 13.3m€ in Series A funding co-led by eCAPITAL and Innovation Industries. The round was joined by KBC Focus Fund and existing investors M Ventures, HTGF, TGFS, and JBN-Invest.

Blue has been a critical weak point ever since the commercialization of OLED displays. Today, deep blue emitters in OLED displays are either stable (fluorescent emitters) or efficient (phosphorescent emitters, TADF emitters), but no market-ready technology delivers both metrics at the same time, according to the company.

beeOLED’s intra-metallic emission technology has proven high stability and high efficiency when employed in other display technologies in the past, but, so far, has not been useable in OLEDs. The beeOLED team has managed to make such molecules compatible with the vacuum processing technology used in high-volume OLED display manufacturing. This is achieved by deep knowledge about Lanthanide chemistry (15 metallic rare-earth chemical elements with atomic numbers 57–71) and its application in devices. The technology allows for 100% internal quantum efficiency, a prerequisite for the highest power efficiency in OLED displays.

beeOLED has rediscovered an almost forgotten star amongst the display materials: divalent Europium (Eu2+). Due to its near-perfect emission characteristics, Eu2+ had been extensively used as blue dopant in Plasma TVs in the early 2000s; however, it was deemed unfit for OLED use. Leveraging the latest advances in Europium chemistry, beeOLED has managed to stabilize Eu2+ to make it usable in OLEDs. The fundamental concept is protected by several base patents.

Unlike other approaches, beeOLED has designed the emitter around a single atom. Light generation happens inside this one atom and no chemical bond is involved. Thus, it’s fundamentally impossible to break anything. The light generation is 100% efficient resulting in a highly efficient blue emitter with nearly unlimited stability potential.

The OLED materials TAM is expected to reach $2.2 billion in 2027 according to DSCC analysts. beeOLED estimates that the serviceable market for its OLED emitter dopant materials will be approx. 1/3 of this market.

beeOLED’s products are blue emitter materials (fine chemicals) for OLED applications. The company will employ a fabless business model, in which the materials are produced at fine chemicals foundries. Sales will be B2B, with the big OLED display producers, such as Samsung, LGD, BOE, as future customers.

Dr. Jan Blochwitz-Nimoth, CEO (previously founder and CTO/CSO of OLED material maker Novaled, now part of Samsung. Before that CEO of Arioso Systems, now part of Bosch Sensortec)

Dr. Carsten Rothe, CTO & Co-Founder (Founding CEO, 12+ years’ experience at Novaled and Idemitsu)

Dr. Volodymyr Senkovskyy, COO & Co-Founder (7+ years’ experience in OLED materials synthesis and mass production implementation at Novaled)