ZEISS said on October 8, 2026 that it had acquired Ceres Holographics, a holographic technology company headquartered in Livingston, Scotland. The deal was made through ZEISS Microoptics, the business unit that is working to bring holography into volume production for the automotive, aerospace and consumer markets.
The two sides agreed not to disclose the purchase price or other terms.
Ceres will become part of ZEISS Microoptics. Andy Travers, who leads Ceres, said joining ZEISS would give the company more resources and global reach and the chance to build on its success at greater scale. The announcement did not say whether Ceres's Scottish site or staff numbers would change.
What Ceres built
Ceres was founded in 2009. It develops proprietary methods for manufacturing holograms, and its main application is the holographic windshield display, in which a thin holographic film in the glass shows information to the driver without the bulky projector a conventional head-up display needs.
An earlier report in Scottish Financial News, written when the company was based in St Andrews, described Ceres as a developer of thin-film holographic optical elements for transparent displays and augmented reality head-up displays. It specialised in designing, mastering and copying those films, putting optical power into the windshield and shrinking the projector package, which carmakers struggle to fit behind the dashboard.
ZEISS said Ceres already has commercial relationships with car manufacturers. Neither company named them.
“This acquisition marks an exciting new chapter for Ceres Holographics and the industrialization of holography.”
The funding
Ceres has been backed by private investors and by European grants. When the European Commission awarded it a €1.4 million (about $1.6 million) Horizon 2020 grant, Scottish Financial News reported that it had secured €6.1 million (about $7 million) in total from private investors and the Horizon 2020 programme. That report did not name the private investors, and the companies did not give a more recent total.
The grant was meant to help Ceres scale up its precision mastering and replication technology, the process of making a master hologram and copying it onto large-format film, so it could meet demand from supply chain partners and carmakers. The company said at the time that its technology could be applied in many fields but that automotive was its first target market.
At the time of that grant, Travers said all major carmakers were looking for small, low-cost transparent displays and high-performance augmented reality head-up displays that could be made at the quality, price and volume the market needs.
Why ZEISS is buying
ZEISS already sells holographic technology under its ProSight platform. It said Ceres's hologram manufacturing innovations complement that platform, and that the combined team would push holography into new uses beyond cars, including retail, near-to-eye displays and public transport.
Roman Kleindienst, head of ZEISS Microoptics, said the two companies shared a commitment to advancing holography and would together write a new chapter in bringing it to market, with faster industrialisation.
The sale gives Ceres, which reported about €6 million of outside funding in its earlier years, access to ZEISS's manufacturing resources. ZEISS has framed the deal around industrialisation: turning a technology proven in prototypes and early commercial work into something that can be produced at scale for car manufacturers and other customers.
What happens next
ZEISS announced the deal in a release datelined Jena, Germany. It said the combined team would have more resources to take holography from development into industrial production, but gave no figures for headcount, investment or production volumes.
Travers said Ceres had built its position through its work on hologram manufacturing and that joining ZEISS was the next step. ZEISS, for its part, said it plans to use the combined capabilities to enter markets where it does not yet sell holographic products. Neither company said whether the Ceres name would be kept.
