"We're in advanced discussions with a number of LCD display manufacturers in Taiwan and Korea, where the vast majority of this stuff is made," said Ed Teague, CEO of Bright View Technologies.
Bright View was co-founded in 2003 by Ed Fadel and David Reed, based on technology licensed from Duke University.
In addition to financing sales and marketing efforts, the latest round of financing also will be used to develop more new products. If all goes as planned, the 42-employee company will raise more money in the fall to ramp up manufacturing.
"We do everything here in Morrisville," Teague said. "We take the raw material in ... and the final product goes out."
Bright View's optical films -- thin sheets of plastic used in screens and monitors -- are engineered to reduce the cost and enhance the viewing experience by improving factors such as brightness, contrast and resolution, Teague said. Different films have different characteristics.
Today all LCD screens have two or three films, but one of Bright View's products enables using a single film. "We have the only single-film solution," Teague said.
The company's films for LCD screens will start shipping at the end of this year; films for plasma screens are expected to hit the market next year.
The company also recently started shipping a product for a second market: lighting fixtures using light-emitting diodes, the tiny chips known as LEDs.
Bright View's optical films for that market diffuse light so that multiple LED light sources appear to be a single source -- giving it the look of conventional lighting. The films accomplish this without absorbing the light, which enables LED lighting to maintain its efficiency.
"One of the fundamental value propositions of LED lighting is that ... they use less power," Teague said. Teague previously was a vice president at Cree, an LED manufacturer based in Durham.
Although the LED lighting market is just emerging, the flat-screen display market has arrived.
About 300 million LCD screens and monitors are expected to be sold worldwide in 2008; the films for these displays represents a $2.4 billion market, Teague said.
Such a large market has attracted some big players, including industrial giant 3M. But Teague is confident that Bright View can make inroads by hitting the sweet spot of performance and price.
To date the company has raised $30 million in financing.
The latest money was raised by Battery Ventures, a giant venture capital firm that previously invested in Bright View. Morgan Jones, general partner at Battery and a member of Bright View's board of directors, couldn't be reached for comment.