Meet the Shenzhen billionaire behind the world’s thinnest flexible display
Bill Liu, co-founder of Royole Corp, sees the firm’s ultra-thin and flexible high-resolution displays being used in smartphones and various applications
The idea came to him while lounging on the Stanford University lawn as an electrical engineering student: a flexible display that could be tucked away like a pen.
“Big screens that we can roll up and put in our pocket,” said Bill Liu, 35, co-founder, chairman and chief executive of Shenzhen-based unicorn Royole Corp.
Liu has been chasing that dream ever since, and after showing the world’s thinnest flexible, full-colour smartphone display in 2014, he now has a long list of venture capitalists backing him.
Following a stint as a research scientist at International Business Machines Corp in New York, Liu moved to the southern coastal city of Shenzhen and founded Royole with two other engineers with Stanford backgrounds.
Now in its sixth year, the start-up was valued at US$5 billion in its latest Series E round of funding. Many of its 2,000 employees are working to mass produce the displays at a Shenzhen production campus built with Royole’s cache of venture capital money.