STX Aprilis is a leader in holographic technology development. Founded in 1999 by a team of engineers from Polaroid Corporation, the company’s vision was to provide advanced optical data storage through the application and development of holographic data storage. In October 2007, the IWHM Award was received in recognition of the Company's holographic recording materials having "outstanding performance of high sensitivity, wide dynamic range, and low shrinkage" that "are now widely accepted as one of the world's best materials for hologram recording." STX Aprilis was a member and supplier, respectively, to two DARPA-funded consortia, PRISM (Photorefractive Information Storage Materials) and HDSS (Holographic Data Storage Systems), which developed the critical technologies for holographic data storage.

The PRISM project’s main goal was to identify, evaluate and further develop promising holographic storage materials. PRISM selected STX Aprilis CROP holographic materials as the best of 57 candidate materials. Consequently, and after further advances in media development, STX Aprilis provided HDSS with disk holographic media that was used to demonstrate a 1 Gigabit/sec holographic storage application with real time recording and reading from a continuously spinning disk. The ability to record information as data pages or micro-holograms in STX Aprilis media, while it is moving, still differentiates it from other candidate materials for holographic storage.

STX Aprilis continues to demonstrate the highest dynamic range and recording densities per unit thickness in its patented CROP holographic photopolymer materials for both data page and micro-hologram implementations. Many of the world’s leading optical storage developers are using developmental STX Aprilis media in their test and evaluation systems for holographic data storage.

STX Aprilis owns an extensive patent portfolio covering fundamental materials and compositions as well as critical elements of media design, assembly and packaging. The Company also owns a grouping of patents covering essential elements of optical and system architectures for holographic data storage drives; fundamental multiplexing methods for achieving high storage density in data page implementations; essential methods for recording and reading micro-holograms; as well as fundamental methods for positioning, mounting, alignment and servo.