Lidar
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Lidar startup Ouster raises $42M in push to grow sales, diversify products
Lidar startup Ouster has spent the past several years expanding and improving its line of sensors as it jostles for a piece of the crowded and competitive market place. Now, Ouster says it has raised $42 million, fresh capital that will be used to fund product development and ramp up sales.
In short: Ouster is keeping the fight alive and there are signs that the San Francisco-based startup is making progress despite some headwinds. The $42 million Series B round didn’t feature any new investors — existing backers Cox Automotive, Fontinalis Partners and Tao Capital Partners all participated — and it was less than its previous raise of $60 million. Ouster, like many others, also reduced its workforce by 10% due to COVID-19, the company confirmed.
However, it’s worth noting that Ouster managed to close the round in the midst of COVID-19 and has continued to increase sales, even as its San Francisco-based manufacturing facility was shuttered temporarily due to a COVID-related government shutdown. The business grew enough to avoid further layoffs and to fully pay all employees and temp workers, according to the company. Ouster has raised $140 million to date.
Ouster wouldn’t share specific revenue numbers, but the company said its 12-month revenue has grown 62%, with third-quarter bookings up 209% year-over-year — a stat that makes sense, considering its business model and the expansion of its product line.
Lidar measures distance using laser light to generate highly accurate 3D maps of the world around the car. Lidar is considered by most in the automated vehicle technology industry a key sensor required to safely deploy robotaxis and other autonomous vehicles (with perhaps the exception of Elon Musk and a few others).
Ouster is taking a different technological and business approach than many of its competitors.
The company’s lasers and photodetectors are printed onto two chips using a standard process to produce integrated circuits (known as CMOS to those in the know). Ouster says this allows it to ditch the more common practice of stacking discrete components on top of each other to reach the desired resolution. Ouster argues that its approach results in a less complex sensor that is more reliable and cheaper.
“Ouster’s digital lidar architecture gives us fundamental advantages that are winning over customers in every market we serve. Digital CMOS technology is the future of lidar and Ouster was the first to invent, build, patent, and commercialize digital lidar. Once our customers experience the resolution and reliability of these sensors at an affordable price, there’s no turning back to legacy analog lidar,” Ouster CEO Angus Pacala said in a statement.
In January, Ouster launched its second-generation lidar product line, which includes three different 128-beam sensors to be used for different purposes, including one designed for navigating urban environments and warehouses. The other two sensors include a mid-range model with a 120-meter range and a 45-degree field of view, and a long-range lidar sensor with a more than 200-meter range for high-speed vehicle automation. All three products are currently shipping to customers and are available in 50 different configurations, according to Ouster.
The company’s business model is also slightly different than many others. Instead of targeting automakers or companies trying to commercialize robotaxis, Ouster has cast a wider net to diversify its business. The company is selling its lidar sensors to robotics, drones, mapping, defense, building security, mining and agriculture companies. The company launched in January its second-generation lidar sensors, which included three new 128-beam models that have different applications. The second-generation line is an improvement from its previous 64-beam models, with better resolution.
The strategy has appeared to pay off. Ouster has doubled its customer base since March 2019, according to the company. Today, Ouster says it has 800 customers across 15 markets, including Konecranes, Postmates, Ike, May Mobility, Kodiak Robotics, Coast Autonomous, the U.S. Army, NASA, Stanford University and MIT. Some of that growth has come from sales to Chinese automation companies such as idriverplus, WhaleAI, Hongjing Drive and qCraft.
Despite the growth, Ouster needs the capital to scale, as designing, manufacturing and selling lidar sensors is an expensive undertaking. Ouster has opened offices in Paris, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Hong Kong and Suzhou to expand global sales and customer service capabilities. It also has two manufacturing facilities. Its San Francisco facility, which opened in March 2019, is primarily used to introduce new products. Production volumes are lower at this facility. Once the product is validated, they’re transferred to Ouster’s contract manufacturer Benchmark in Southeast Asia.
Benchmark is now producing hundreds to thousands of second-generation sensors per month, according to Ouster.
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Lidar startup Luminar to go public via $3.4 billion SPAC merger
Luminar, the lidar startup that burst onto the autonomous vehicle scene in April 2017 after operating for years in secrecy, is merging with special purpose acquisition company Gores Metropoulos Inc., with a post-deal market valuation of $3.4 billion.
Gores Metropoulos, which is listed on the Nasdaq exchange, is a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, sponsored by an affiliate of The Gores Group, the global investment firm founded in the late 1980s by Alec Gores.
The SPAC merger comes just three months after Luminar hit a critical milestone and announced that Volvo would start producing vehicles in 2022 equipped with its lidar and a perception stack. The Luminar technology will be used to deploy an automated driving system for highways.
Luminar founder and CEO Austin Russell told TechCrunch that they wanted to go public at some point. But the momentum from the Volvo deal along with interest within public markets led the company to take the SPAC route, Russell said.
Luminar is the latest startup — and second lidar company — to turn to SPACs this summer in lieu of a traditional IPO process. In June, Velodyne Lidar struck a deal to merge with special purpose acquisition company Graf Industrial Corp., with a market value of $1.8 billion. Four electric vehicle startups have also skipped the traditional IPO path in recent months, opting instead to go public through a merger agreement with a SPAC, which are also known as blank check companies. Canoo, Fisker Inc., Lordstown Motors and Nikola Corp. have gone public via a SPAC merger this spring and summer.
Luminar said it was able to raise $170 million in private investment in public equity, or PIPE, by institutional investors, including Alec Gores, Van Tuyl Companies, Peter Thiel, Volvo Cars Tech Fund, Crescent Cove, Moore Strategic Ventures, GoPro founder Nick Woodman and VectoIQ, with the majority of the major existing investors participating. The transaction will also include a balance of about $400 million cash that has been held by Gores Metropoulos.
Once the transaction closes, Luminar will maintain its name and will be listed on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol LAZR. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2020. Russell will continue to serve as CEO and Tom Fennimore will continue to serve as CFO. Alec Gores will join the Luminar board of directors upon closing of the transaction.
“This milestone is pivotal not just for us, but also for the larger automotive industry,” said Russell said in a statement. “Eight years ago, we took on a problem to which most thought there would be no technically or commercially viable solution. We worked relentlessly to build the tech from the ground up to solve it and partnered directly with the leading global automakers to show the world what’s possible. Today, we are making our next industry leap through our new long-term partnership with Gores Metropoulos, a team that has deep experience in technology and automotive and shares our vision of a safe autonomous future powered by Luminar.”
Luminar was founded by Russell in 2012, but it operated in secret for years until coming out of stealth in spring 2017 with backing from Thiel and others. Russell, who is now 25 years old, worked on the Luminar technology as a Thiel fellow, which gives young people $100,000 over two years to drop out of college and pursue their ideas.
Luminar raised $250 million prior to the SPAC announcement. The company now has 350 employees and operations in Silicon Valley as well as a factory in Orlando. Luminar said it plans to open an office in Detroit as well.
Lidar, light detection and ranging radar, measures distance using laser light to generate a highly accurate 3D map of the world around the car. The sensor is widely considered critical to the commercial deployment of autonomous vehicles. Automakers have also begun to view lidar as an important sensor to be used to beef up the capabilities and safety of its advanced driver assistance systems in the new cars trucks and SUVs available to consumers.
Volvo is one of those automakers. Luminar’s Iris lidar sensors — which TechCrunch has described as about the size of really thick sandwich and one-third smaller than its previous iterations — will be integrated in the roof of Volvo’s production vehicles, beginning in 2022.
Luminar also announced Monday that it has hired 16 people who worked on Samsung’s now dissolved DRVLINE team. Samsung once described the DRVLINE platform as an “open, modular, and scalable hardware and software-based platform” for the autonomous driving market. Earlier this year, TechCrunch reported that Samsung shuttered the DRVLINE/Smart Machines team.
Those hires are directly tied to Luminar’s strategy to capitalize on what Russell believes is the nearer term application of lidar in production vehicles, not robotaxis. Luminar is still working with companies seeking to commercialize robotaxis, but he believes it’s a longer-term play.
“I think that there are huge, long-term promises associated with robotaxis, but I really see that market taking off in the 2030s as opposed to the 2020s,” Russell said. Lidar used to support active driver safety system will be provides the kind of volume and economies of scale that are going to be driving this business, he added.
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Baraja’s unique and ingenious take on lidar shines in a crowded industry
It seems like every company making lidar has a new and clever approach, but Baraja takes the cake. Its method is not only elegant and powerful, but fundamentally avoids many issues that nag other lidar technologies. But it’ll need more than smart tech to make headway in this complex and evolving industry.
To understand how lidar works in general, consult my handy introduction to the topic. Essentially a laser emitted by a device skims across or otherwise very quickly illuminates the scene, and the time it takes for that laser’s photons to return allows it to quite precisely determine the distance of every spot it points at.
But to picture how Baraja’s lidar works, you need to picture the cover of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon.”
GIFs kind of choke on rainbows, but you get the idea.
Imagine a flashlight shooting through a prism like that, illuminating the scene in front of it — now imagine you could focus that flashlight by selecting which color came out of the prism, sending more light to the top part of the scene (red and orange) or middle (yellow and green). That’s what Baraja’s lidar does, except naturally it’s a bit more complicated than that.
The company has been developing its tech for years with the backing of Sequoia and Australian VC outfit Blackbird, which led a $32 million round late in 2018 — Baraja only revealed its tech the next year and was exhibiting it at CES, where I met with co-founder and CEO Federico Collarte.
“We’ve stayed in stealth for a long, long time,” he told me. “The people who needed to know already knew about us.”
The idea for the tech came out of the telecommunications industry, where Collarte and co-founder Cibby Pulikkaseril thought of a novel use for a fiber optic laser that could reconfigure itself extremely quickly.
“We thought if we could set the light free, send it through prism-like optics, then we could steer a laser beam without moving parts. The idea seemed too simple — we thought, ‘if it worked, then everybody would be doing it this way,’ ” he told me, but they quit their jobs and worked on it for a few months with a friends and family round, anyway. “It turns out it does work, and the invention is very novel and hence we’ve been successful in patenting it.”
Rather than send a coherent laser at a single wavelength (1550 nanometers, well into the infrared, is the lidar standard), Baraja uses a set of fixed lenses to refract that beam into a spectrum spread vertically over its field of view. Yet it isn’t one single beam being split but a series of coded pulses, each at a slightly different wavelength that travels ever so slightly differently through the lenses. It returns the same way, the lenses bending it the opposite direction to return to its origin for detection.
It’s a bit difficult to grasp this concept, but once one does it’s hard to see it as anything but astonishingly clever. Not just because of the fascinating optics (something I’m partial to, if it isn’t obvious), but because it obviates a number of serious problems other lidars are facing or about to face.
First, there are next to no moving parts whatsoever in the entire Baraja system. Spinning lidars like the popular early devices from Velodyne are being replaced at large by ones using metamaterials, MEMS, and other methods that don’t have bearings or hinges that can wear out.
Baraja’s “head” unit, connected by fiber optic to the brain.
In Baraja’s system, there are two units, a “dumb” head and an “engine.” The head has no moving parts and no electronics; it’s all glass, just a set of lenses. The engine, which can be located nearby or a foot or two away, produces the laser and sends it to the head via a fiber-optic cable (and some kind of proprietary mechanism that rotates slowly enough that it could theoretically work for years continuously). This means it’s not only very robust physically, but its volume can be spread out wherever is convenient in the car’s body. The head itself also can be resized more or less arbitrarily without significantly altering the optical design, Collarte said.
Second, the method of diffracting the beam gives the system considerable leeway in how it covers the scene. Different wavelengths are sent out at different vertical angles; a shorter wavelength goes out toward the top of the scene and a slightly longer one goes a little lower. But the band of 1550 +/- 20 nanometers allows for millions of fractional wavelengths that the system can choose between, giving it the ability to set its own vertical resolution.
It could for instance (these numbers are imaginary) send out a beam every quarter of a nanometer in wavelength, corresponding to a beam going out every quarter of a degree vertically, and by going from the bottom to the top of its frequency range cover the top to the bottom of the scene with equally spaced beams at reasonable intervals.
But why waste a bunch of beams on the sky, say, when you know most of the action is taking place in the middle part of the scene, where the street and roads are? In that case you can send out a few high frequency beams to check up there, then skip down to the middle frequencies, where you can then send out beams with intervals of a thousandth of a nanometer, emerging correspondingly close together to create a denser picture of that central region.
If this is making your brain hurt a little, don’t worry. Just think of Dark Side of the Moon and imagine if you could skip red, orange and purple, and send out more beams in green and blue — and because you’re only using those colors, you can send out more shades of green-blue and deep blue than before.
Third, the method of creating the spectrum beam provides against interference from other lidar systems. It is an emerging concern that lidar systems of a type could inadvertently send or reflect beams into one another, producing noise and hindering normal operation. Most companies are attempting to mitigate this by some means or another, but Baraja’s method avoids the possibility altogether.
“The interference problem — they’re living with it. We solved it,” said Collarte.
The spectrum system means that for a beam to interfere with the sensor it would have to be both a perfect frequency match and come in at the precise angle at which that frequency emerges from and returns to the lens. That’s already vanishingly unlikely, but to make it astronomically so, each beam from the Baraja device is not a single pulse but a coded set of pulses that can be individually identified. The company’s core technology and secret sauce is the ability to modulate and pulse the laser millions of times per second, and it puts this to good use here.
Collarte acknowledged that competition is fierce in the lidar space, but not necessarily competition for customers. “They have not solved the autonomy problem,” he points out, “so the volumes are too small. Many are running out of money. So if you don’t differentiate, you die.” And some have.
Instead companies are competing for partners and investors, and must show that their solution is not merely a good idea technically, but that it is a sound investment and reasonable to deploy at volume. Collarte praised his investors, Sequoia and Blackbird, but also said that the company will be announcing significant partnerships soon, both in automotive and beyond.
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Sense Photonics brings its fancy new flash lidar to market
There’s no shortage of lidar solutions available for autonomous vehicles, drones and robots — theoretically, anyway. But getting a lidar unit from theory to mass production might be harder than coming up with the theory in the first place. Sense Photonics appears to have made it past that part of the journey, and is now offering its advanced flash lidar for pre-order.
Lidar comes in a variety of form factors, but the spinning type we’ve seen so much of is on its way out, and more compact, reliable planar types are on the way in; Luminar is making moves to get ahead, but Sense Photonics isn’t sitting still — and anyway, the two companies have different strengths.
While Luminar and some other companies aim to create a forward-facing lidar that can detect shapes hundreds of feet ahead in a relatively narrow field of view, Sense is going after the short-range, wide-angle side of things. And because they sync up with regular cameras, it’s easy as pie to map depth onto the RGB image:
Sense Photonics makes it easy to match traditional camera views with depth data
These are lidars that you’d want mounted on the rear or sides of the vehicles, able to cover a wide slice of the surroundings and get accurate detection of things like animals, kids and bikes quickly and accurately. But I went through all this when they came out of stealth.
The news today is that these units have gone from prototype to production design. The devices have been ruggedized so they can be attached outside of enclosures even in dusty or rainy environments. And performance has been improved, bumping the maximum range in some cases out to more than 40 meters, well over what was promised before.
The base price of $2,900 covers a unit with an 80×30 degree field of view, but others cover wider areas, up to 95×75 degrees — a large amount by lidar standards, and in higher fidelity than other flash lidars out there. You do give up some other properties in return for the wide view, though. The proprietary tech created by the company lets the lidar’s detector be located elsewhere than the laser emitter, too, which makes designing around the things easier (if not exactly easy).
Obviously if people are meant to order these online from the company these are not going to be appearing in next year’s autonomous vehicles. No, it’s more for bulk purchases by companies doing serious testing in industry settings.
Whether the Sense Photonics kit or some other lucky lidar company’s ends up on the robo-fleets of tomorrow is up in the air, but it does help for your product to actually exist. You can find out more about the company’s lidar platform here.
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Voyant Photonics raises $4.3M to fit lidar on the head of a pin
Lidar is a critical method by which robots and autonomous vehicles sense the world around them, but the lasers and sensors generally take up a considerable amount of space. Not so with Voyant Photonics, which has created a lidar system that you really could conceivably balance on the head of a pin.
Before getting into the science, it’s worth noting why this is important. Lidar is most often used as a way for a car to sense things at a medium distance — far away, radar can outperform it, and up close, ultrasonics and other methods are more compact. But from a few feet to a couple hundred feed out, lidar is very useful.
Unfortunately, even the most compact lidar solutions today are still, roughly, the size of a hand, and the ones ready for use in production vehicles are still larger. A very small lidar unit that could be hidden on every corner of a car, or even inside the cabin, could provide rich positional data about everything in and around the car with little power and no need to disrupt the existing lines and design. (And that’s not getting into the many, many other industries that could use this.)
Lidar began with the idea of, essentially, a single laser being swept across a scene multiple times per second, its reflection carefully measured to track the distances of objects. But mechanically steered lasers are bulky, slow and prone to failure, so newer companies are attempting other techniques, like illuminating the whole scene at once (flash lidar) or steering the beam with complex electronic surfaces (metamaterials) instead.
One discipline that seems primed to join in the fun is silicon photonics, which is essentially the manipulation of light on a chip for various purposes — for instance, to replace electricity in logic gates to provide ultra-fast, low-heat processing. Voyant, however, has pioneered a technique to apply silicon photonics to lidar.
In the past, attempts in chip-based photonics to send out a coherent laser-like beam from a surface of lightguides (elements used to steer light around or emit it) have been limited by a low field of view and power because the light tends to interfere with itself at close quarters.
Voyant’s version of these “optical phased arrays” sidesteps that problem by carefully altering the phase of the light traveling through the chip. The result is a strong beam of non-visible light that can be played over a wide swathe of the environment at high speed with no moving parts at all — yet it emerges from a chip dwarfed by a fingertip.
“This is an enabling technology because it’s so small,” said Voyant co-founder Steven Miller. “We’re talking cubic centimeter volumes. There’s a lot of electronics that can’t accommodate a lidar the size of a softball — think about drones and things that are weight-sensitive, or robotics, where it needs to be on the tip of its arm.”
Lest you think this is just a couple yahoos who think they’ve one-upped years of research, Miller and co-founder Chris Phare came out of the Lipson Nanophotonics Group at Columbia University.
“This lab basically invented silicon photonics,” said Phare. “We’re all deeply ingrained with the physics and devices-level stuff. So we were able to step back and look at lidar, and see what we needed to fix and make better to make this a reality.”
The advances they’ve made frankly lie outside my area of expertise, so I won’t attempt to characterize them too closely, except that it solves the interference issues and uses a frequency modulated continuous wave technique, which lets it measure velocity as well as distance (Blackmore does this as well). At any rate, their unique approach to moving and emitting light from the chip lets them create a device that is not only compact, but combines transmitter and receiver in one piece, and has good performance — not just good for its size, they claim, but good.
“It’s a misconception that small lidars need to be low-performance,” explained Phare. “The silicon photonic architecture we use lets us build a very sensitive receiver on-chip that would be difficult to assemble in traditional optics. So we’re able to fit a high-performance lidar into that tiny package without any additional or exotic components. We think we can achieve specs comparable to lidars out there, but just make them that much smaller.”
The chip-based lidar in its test bed.
It’s even able to be manufactured in a normal fashion like other photonics chips. That’s a huge plus when you’re trying to move from research to product development.
With this first round of funding, the team plans to expand and get this tech out of the lab and into the hands of engineers and developers. The exact specs, dimensions, power requirements and so on are all very different depending on the application and industry, so Voyant can make decisions based on feedback from people in other fields.
In addition to automotive (“It’s such a big application that no one can make lidar and not look at that space,” Miller said), the team is in talks with numerous potential partners.
Although being at this stage while others are raising nine-figure rounds might seem daunting, Voyant has the advantage that it has created something totally different from what’s out there, a product that can safely exist alongside popular big lidars from companies like Innoviz and Luminar.
“We’re definitely talking to big players in a lot of these places, drones and robotics, perhaps augmented reality. We’re trying to suss out exactly where this is most interesting to people,” said Phare. “We see the evolution here being something like bringing room-size computers down to chips.”
The $4.3 million raised by Voyant comes from Contour Venture Partners, LDV Capital and DARPA, which naturally would be interested in something like this.
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Startups at the speed of light: Lidar CEOs put their industry in perspective
As autonomous cars and robots loom over the landscapes of cities and jobs alike, the technologies that empower them are forming sub-industries of their own. One of those is lidar, which has become an indispensable tool to autonomy, spawning dozens of companies and attracting hundreds of millions in venture funding.
But like all industries built on top of fast-moving technologies, lidar and the sensing business is by definition built somewhat upon a foundation of shifting sands. New research appears weekly advancing the art, and no less frequently are new partnerships minted, as car manufacturers like Audi and BMW scramble to keep ahead of their peers in the emerging autonomy economy.
To compete in the lidar industry means not just to create and follow through on difficult research and engineering, but to be prepared to react with agility as the market shifts in response to trends, regulations, and disasters.
I talked with several CEOs and investors in the lidar space to find out how the industry is changing, how they plan to compete, and what the next few years have in store.
Their opinions and predictions sometimes synced up and at other times diverged completely. For some, the future lies manifestly in partnerships they have already established and hope to nurture, while others feel that it’s too early for automakers to commit, and they’re stringing startups along one non-exclusive contract at a time.
All agreed that the technology itself is obviously important, but not so important that investors will wait forever for engineers to get it out of the lab.
And while some felt a sensor company has no business building a full-stack autonomy solution, others suggested that’s the only way to attract customers navigating a strange new market.
It’s a flourishing market but one, they all agreed, that will experience a major consolidation in the next year. In short, it’s a wild west of ideas, plentiful money, and a bright future — for some.
The evolution of lidar
I’ve previously written an introduction to lidar, but in short, lidar units project lasers out into the world and measure how they are reflected, producing a 3D picture of the environment around them.
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Sense Photonics flashes onto the lidar scene with a new approach and $26M
Lidar is a critical part of many autonomous cars and robotic systems, but the technology is also evolving quickly. A new company called Sense Photonics just emerged from stealth mode today with a $26M A round, touting a whole new approach that allows for an ultra-wide field of view and (literally) flexible installation.
Still in prototype phase but clearly enough to attract eight figures of investment, Sense Photonics’ lidar doesn’t look dramatically different from others at first, but the changes are both under the hood and, in a way, on both sides of it.
Early popular lidar systems like those from Velodyne use a spinning module that emit and detect infrared laser pulses, finding the range of the surroundings by measuring the light’s time of flight. Subsequent ones have replaced the spinning unit with something less mechanical, like a DLP-type mirror or even metamaterials-based beam steering.
All these systems are “scanning” systems in that they sweep a beam, column, or spot of light across the scene in some structured fashion — faster than we can perceive, but still piece by piece. Few companies, however, have managed to implement what’s called “flash” lidar, which illuminates the whole scene with one giant, well, flash.
That’s what Sense has created, and it claims to have avoided the usual shortcomings of such systems — namely limited resolution and range. Not only that, but by separating the laser emitting part and the sensor that measures the pulses, Sense’s lidar could be simpler to install without redesigning the whole car around it.
I talked with CEO and co-founder Scott Burroughs, a veteran engineer of laser systems, about what makes Sense’s lidar a different animal from the competition.
“It starts with the laser emitter,” he said. “We have some secret sauce that lets us build a massive array of lasers — literally thousands and thousands, spread apart for better thermal performance and eye safety.”
These tiny laser elements are stuck on a flexible backing, meaning the array can be curved — providing a vastly improved field of view. Lidar units (except for the 360-degree ones) tend to be around 120 degrees horizontally, since that’s what you can reliably get from a sensor and emitter on a flat plane, and perhaps 50 or 60 degrees vertically.
“We can go as high as 90 degrees for vert which i think is unprecedented, and as high as 180 degrees for horizontal,” said Burroughs proudly. “And that’s something auto makers we’ve talked to have been very excited about.”
Here it is worth mentioning that lidar systems have also begun to bifurcate into long-range, forward-facing lidar (like those from Luminar and Lumotive) for detecting things like obstacles or people 200 meters down the road, and more short-range, wider-field lidar for more immediate situational awareness — a dog behind the vehicle as it backs up, or a car pulling out of a parking spot just a few meters away. Sense’s devices are very much geared toward the second use case.
These are just prototype units, but they work and you can see they’re more than just renders.
Particularly because of the second interesting innovation they’ve included: the sensor, normally part and parcel with the lidar unit, can exist totally separately from the emitter, and is little more than a specialized camera. That means that while the emitter can be integrated into a curved surface like the headlight assembly, while the tiny detectors can be stuck in places where there are already traditional cameras: side mirrors, bumpers, and so on.
The camera-like architecture is more than convenient for placement; it also fundamentally affects the way the system reconstructs the image of its surroundings. Because the sensor they use is so close to an ordinary RGB camera’s, images from the former can be matched to the latter very easily.
The depth data and traditional camera image correspond pixel-to-pixel right out of the system.
Most lidars output a 3D point cloud, the result of the beam finding millions of points with different ranges. This is a very different form of “image” than a traditional camera, and it can take some work to convert or compare the depths and shapes of a point cloud to a 2D RGB image. Sense’s unit not only outputs a 2D depth map natively, but that data can be synced with a twin camera so the visible light image matches pixel for pixel to the depth map. It saves on computing time and therefore on delay — always a good thing for autonomous platforms.
Sense Photonics’ unit also can output a point cloud, as you see here.
The benefits of Sense’s system are manifest, but of course right now the company is still working on getting the first units to production. To that end it has of course raised the $26 million A round, “co-led by Acadia Woods and Congruent Ventures, with participation from a number of other investors, including Prelude Ventures, Samsung Ventures and Shell Ventures,” as the press release puts it.
Cash on hand is always good. But it has also partnered with Infineon and others, including an unnamed tier-1 automotive company, which is no doubt helping shape the first commercial Sense Photonics product. The details will have to wait until later this year when that offering solidifies, and production should start a few months after that — no hard timeline yet, but expect this all before the end of the year.
“We are very appreciative of this strong vote of investor confidence in our team and our technology,” Burroughs said in the press release. “The demand we’ve encountered – even while operating in stealth mode – has been extraordinary.”
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Innoviz extends funding round to $170 million to bring its lidar tech to self-driving cars
Just a few months ago, Innoviz became one of the better capitalized lidar startups when it announced it had raised $132 million in a Series C funding round. But that wouldn’t be the end of it.
The company kept the funding doors propped open and ultimately captured another $38 million from investors. The round has closed at $170 million, Innoviz said Monday.
Initial investors in the Series C round included China Merchants Capital, Shenzhen Capital Group, New Alliance Capital, Israeli institutional investors Harel Insurance Investments and Financial Services and Phoenix Insurance Company. The newest investors, and those responsible for the fresh injection of $38 million, were not named.
The close of the Series C round brings Innoviz’s total funding to $252 million.
The lidar industry is brimming with startups — about 70 according to industry experts — that see an opportunity to sell their tech to companies developing autonomous vehicles. Lidar measures distance using laser light to generate highly accurate 3D maps of the world around the car. It’s considered by most in the self-driving car industry a key piece of technology required to safely deploy robotaxis and other autonomous vehicles.
Innoviz is aiming for this very space with its solid-state lidar sensors and perception software for autonomous vehicles. The company contends that solid-state lidar technology is more reliable over time because of the lack of moving parts.
Innoviz says that its perception software is what helps it stand out in a sea of lidar startups. The perception software identifies, classifies, segments and tracks objects to give autonomous vehicles a better understanding of the 3D driving scene.
The company plans to use the funding, in part, to further develop the perception software piece. That includes bringing on two computer vision experts, Dr. Raja Giryes and Or Shimshi, as “strategic collaborators.”
The funding will also be used to help Innoviz scale up and eventually mass produce its products. Its automotive-grade lidar product called InnovizOne is entering series production in 2021 for global automakers. The company has an existing solid-state lidar (InnovizPro) that is available now.
Innoviz’s strategy has been to partner with a number of OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers, such as Magna, HARMAN, HiRain Technologies and Aptiv, and to package perception software with its lidar sensors and offer it as a complete unit for companies developing autonomous vehicle technology.
Innoviz has locked in several key customers, notably BMW. The automaker picked Innoviz’s tech for series production of autonomous vehicles starting in 2021.
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Lidar and perception startup Innoviz raises $132 million
Innoviz, the Israel-based startup developing solid-state lidar sensors and perception software for autonomous vehicles, has raised $132 million in a Series C funding round that includes major Chinese financial institutions.
The round, which makes Innoviz one of the better capitalized lidar startups, includes China Merchants Capital (SINO-BLR Industrial Investment Fund, L.P.), Shenzhen Capital Group and New Alliance Capital. Israeli institutional investors Harel Insurance Investments and Financial Services and Phoenix Insurance Company also participated.
The Series C round will remain open for a second closing to be announced in the coming months, the company said.
Lidar measures distance using laser light to generate highly accurate 3D maps of the world around the car. It’s considered by most in the self-driving car industry a key piece of technology required to safely deploy robotaxis and other autonomous vehicles. Innoviz is developing solid-state lidar, which proponents of this technology say is more reliable over time because of the lack of moving parts.
Like so many startups with fresh capital, Innoviz plans to use the funds to scale up the company.
For Innoviz, this means increasing production of its lidar sensors and expanding its manufacturing capacity. Innoviz is focused on expanding in important automotive markets, including the U.S., Europe, Japan and China. Innoviz has been pushing into China over the past year through a partnership with the Chinese automotive supplier HiRain Technologies, a global supplier to some of China’s largest automakers.
That company has half of its business coming from China and has won nine of its supplier agreements with different automakers in the country through its HiRain partnership, according to people with knowledge of the company.
The company’s aim is to enable high-volume delivery of its automotive-grade lidar system called InnovizOne. This product can be produced and sold at a 90 percent lower cost than its first-generation system, according to Innoviz.
Innoviz said it also plans to expand its research and development efforts by investing in the buildout of next-generation products and software that will feature more cost reductions and improved performance.
Innoviz’s strategy has been to partner with a number of OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers such as Magna, HARMAN, HiRain Technologies and Aptiv and to package perception software with its lidar sensors and offer it as a complete unit for companies developing autonomous vehicle technology.
Innoviz has locked in several key customers, notably BMW. The automaker picked Innoviz’s tech for series production of autonomous vehicles starting in 2021.
In March, Lyft announced a partnership with Magna to help get its self-driving tech into various automakers, as well as implement the ride-hailing service into future autonomous cars. Innoviz raised $65 million in Series B funding in 2017, from strategic partners and leading auto industry suppliers Delphi Automotive and Magna International, along with other investors.
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Lidar startup Ouster raises $60 million in production run-up
Ouster has raised $60 million as the San Francisco-based lidar startup opens a new facility that will have the capacity to assemble and ship several thousand sensors a month by the end of 2019.
The new factory, which will have a grand opening ceremony March 28, currently produces hundreds of sensors per month. Ouster says at full capacity, the factory will produce $25 million to $50 million in inventory per month.
Lidar measures distance using laser light to generate highly accurate 3D maps of the world around the car. It’s considered by most in the self-driving car industry a key piece of technology required to safely deploy robotaxis and other autonomous vehicles (although not everyone agrees). However, the sensors are also useful in other industries — and this is where Ouster’s business model is targeted.
Ouster has cast a wider net for customers than some of its rivals. Unlike others vying solely for automotive customers working on the development of autonomous vehicles, Ouster is selling sensors to other industries. Ouster is selling its light detection and ranging radar sensors to robotics, drones, mapping, defense, building security, mining and agriculture companies.
The strategy has appeared to pay off. Ouster says it has 400 customers from 15 industries.
The $60 million in additional funding follows a Series A raise of $27 million announced back in 2017 as Ouster came out of stealth mode. In the years since, the company led by Angus Pacala has grown to more than 100 employees and announced four lidar sensors, with resolutions from 16 to 128 channels, and two product lines, the OS-1 and OS-2. The startup expects to nearly double its headcount in the coming year to support further product line development.
The $60 million in equity and debt funding includes investments from Runway Growth Capital and Silicon Valley Bank, as well as additional funding from Series A participants Cox Enterprises, Constellation Tech Ventures, Fontinalis Partners, Carthona and others.
Ouster said the additional investment has helped to develop Ouster’s product lines, including the launch of the OS-1 128 lidar sensor, and fund the expansion of its production facilities.
The company also announced the appointment of Susan Heystee, senior VP for OEM business at Verizon Connect, to its board of directors.
Waymo, the self-driving car company under Google’s Alphabet, could be a new competitor to the company. Waymo announced this month it will start selling its custom lidar sensors to companies outside of self-driving cars. Waymo will initially target robotics, security and agricultural technology. The sales will help the company scale its autonomous technology faster, making each sensor more affordable through economies of scale, Simon Verghese, head of Waymo’s lidar team, wrote in a Medium post at the time.
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