The word “pivot” is used all too often these days by companies scrambling to remake themselves. The owners of Azumo in Chicago’s River North are now on the third version of their business, which has developed technologies for display screens in cell phones and smart watches that it’s betting Apple and Samsung haven’t thought of yet.

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This latest iteration, nearly a decade in the making, is filled with high hurdles and long shots but beginning to gain notice. Azumo has developed a plastic film the width of a human hair to fit on a digital display screen that switches the light source from back-lit liquid crystal displays to front-lit reflected or ambient light. This allows a cell phone user to read the information on her phone screen outdoors on a sunny day with no glare. It also reduces battery usage by 90 percent. 

So far Azumo’s product has gotten its deepest penetration in industrial and medical sectors. But recently the company has partnered with leading Asian companies such as Sharp and Kyocera to add its front-lit panels to mobile products. “They are targeting hand-held and wearable displays where battery savings is a huge need,” says Mike Casper, CEO and a co-founder of Azumo. “We also have a deal to make front light displays in tablet products that you’ll be seeing soon.”

The company has been through false starts before. Casper, 40, started up a company called BriteIce in 2008 with two fellow University of Wisconsin graduates, Tony Nichol and Shawn Pucylowski. They sold professional hockey’s Boston Bruins on a proposal to sink fully lit promotional advertising into the ice, flashing the ads on and off throughout the game. They almost got there before the team’s management nixed the idea at the eleventh hour. 

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A short time later the threesome pivoted to a new name, FLEx Lighting, and a product called InvisiSign, this time embedding fully lit promotional ads in the glass tops and doors of beverage and food coolers in stores, particularly convenience shops. They had Coke interested and CVS piloting studies, but the idea eventually flamed out. “We thought the brands themselves could control these ads, but the retailers and ad agencies and others all wanted a piece of the action and it became unworkable,” Casper says. 

Meantime Nichol, the techie of the founding trio—“He was studying calculus in, like, fifth grade,” Casper explains—went off to get a doctorate at M.I.T. and immersed himself in the world of flat-panel displays. They were getting thinner and thinner, but the light in the LCDs inside was eating up device battery life. After years of development, Nichol hit on a super-thin film that utilized light in front of, not in back of, the screen to power display text and images. 

The name was changed to Azumo and management—Nichol is chief technology officer and Pucylowski is chief financial officer—elected to remain anchored in Chicago. The firm currently has 30 employees, close to $20 million in sales last year and suppliers around the Midwest it can count on to produce the super-thin film it requires. Bigger rivals are doubtless interested in the Azumo science, but the company is confident that the 60 patents it holds around the world will keep them at bay, at least for a time. It doesn’t manufacture in Asia, fearful its designs might get appropriated. 

Display Supply Chain Consultants advises big flat panel makers around the world, with Robert O’Brien, its senior partner and principal analyst, having spent a decade in the executive ranks of Corning, the maker of more than half the glass in flat-panel displays around the world. He’s seen the Azumo product and come away impressed. But one wonders what such a little company can show big producers like Corning and 3M. 

“A lot of young companies like Azumo have very bright scientists working for them. Some of the biggest breakthroughs come from the smallest companies,” O’Brien says. “In this case, I think they really have something here.” If so, he believes Azumo is unlikely to remain independent. “Apple could buy Azumo with an hour’s worth of revenue,” he observes. “That’s often the path a company like this ends up taking.”

If so, that would count as one more pivot for Azumo.

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