Two years ago, executives from venture capital firm Morgenthaler Ventures and medical device incubator The Foundry flew across the country to talk to officials from the Naval Research Laboratories (NRL) in Washington, DC. "The NRL has a silicon foundry that was doing interesting work in producing a silicon matrix that could be implanted in the retina to restore vision for those who had lost their sight," recalls Robin Bellas, a partner at Morgenthaler.
The idea was to launch a company from The Foundry, to be called Percept, but Morgenthaler and The Foundry decided...