Funding and valuation
Lyte, a robotics and artificial intelligence startup founded by veterans of Apple and Israeli 3D-sensing company PrimeSense, has raised $165 million at a valuation of $1.6 billion. The round was co-led by Maverick Silicon, with participation from Fidelity Management & Research, Atreides Management, Key1 Capital, and Ora Global, as reported by Calcalist and SiliconANGLE. Exor Ventures, which participated in an earlier financing round, is also among Lyte's backers.
According to Calcalist, Lyte's valuation has roughly tripled in less than a year, bringing its total funding to $272 million. The company emerged from stealth on January 5 with $107 million in aggregate funding, and the new capital comes eight months later, more than doubling the amount raised.
The company, based in Mountain View, California, is among a growing group of startups attracting substantial capital for the hardware and infrastructure needed to bring artificial intelligence into the physical world.
Technology and product
Lyte ships custom silicon, multimodal sensors, and spatial software for intelligent robotics. Its flagship product, LyteVision, combines vision, high-resolution imaging, and inertial sensors into a single synchronized system. The company says its custom silicon measures motion natively rather than reconstructing it from cameras and other sensors via software, producing data robots can trust at the source.
According to SiliconANGLE, the robotics industry has been focused on building foundation models driven by massive amounts of visual data, but once deployed, these models depend on high-fidelity vision and sensors built into robots. Off-the-shelf components, such as cameras and infrared tracking, were never designed to work as a single system and can introduce delays, calibration drift, and inaccurate data, the company argues.
Leadership and pedigree
Lyte was founded by former Apple and PrimeSense engineers who worked on Face ID and brought 3D perception mainstream through Microsoft's Kinect. Co-founder and CEO Alexander Shpunt, who previously co-founded PrimeSense — acquired by Apple in 2013 for $350 million, according to Calcalist — said, "Physical AI has a sensing problem before it has a model problem. A robot cannot act safely on data that does not faithfully describe the world."
CTO Arman Hajati was a lead system architect and senior engineering manager at Apple, and third founder Yuval Gerson worked at Apple as a MEMS system architect, according to Calcalist.
The company's chairman and founding investor is Avigdor Willenz, one of Israel's most successful semiconductor entrepreneurs. Willenz founded Galileo Technologies, which developed networking chips and was acquired by Marvell in 2000 in a transaction valued at about $2.7 billion. He later became an early investor in Annapurna Labs, acquired by Amazon in 2015, and was a founder and early investor in Habana Labs, which Intel acquired in 2019 for about $2 billion.
Investor outlook
Willenz expressed confidence in Lyte's position in the market. "Lyte is building at the right layer, at the right moment," he told Calcalist. "I've seen how foundational technologies unlock entire industries." In a statement carried by SiliconANGLE, he added, "Owning the silicon separates companies that define a category from those that participate in one."
The financing will allow Lyte to scale production and expand deployments, according to SiliconANGLE.