Ren Ng, a former student of Marc Levoy's (at Stanford), started the company. Ng was widely believed to be one of the rising superstars in computer graphics/computational imaging when he decided to leave academia and start Refocus Imaging.

The company seems to be doing well, and recently changed names to Lytro in order to not be pigeonholed into refocusing applications only.

A bit off-topic, but do you think that's the right approach? A niche field like that can be really good for a company, and if you want to broach another field, don't you think it's a good idea to start a separate brand and image for that field instead of generalizing away from your niche?

McDonald's bought Chipotle but didn't rename it "McDonald's", neither did they rename McDonald's Chiptole. McDonald's is for hamburgers and Chipotle is for burritos even if the money ends up in the hands of the same people.

It is almost never beneficial to merge existing brands (unless one of the brands has a horrible reputation), so why should someone generalize away from a successful niche application and lose the associated branding instead of just starting a new brand for the new field?

I don't know -- I'm a computer vision researcher, not a marketer ;-)

And thank God for both those facts. Too many of one and not enough of the other.