Lyte raises $165 million funding, valuation jumps 3x to $1.6 billion

Lyte, a fast-growing robotics and artificial intelligence startup from top members of Apple Inc.'s Face ID team, has secured about $165 million in a new funding round that more than triples the company's valuation to $1.6 billion. 

The latest financing was led by Maverick Silicon, according to a statement on Wednesday, with participation from existing investors, including Fidelity Management & Research - which led the previous Series B round - and Atreides Management, Key1 Capital and Ora Global. The startup has raised a total of $272 million since its 2021 founding. 

 The company, which develops technology to help robots see better and navigate their surroundings more safely, said it will use the financing to scale production of its sensing silicon and LyteVision platform. The new funding will also go toward hiring additional staff, including roles in engineering, operations, customer support and senior leadership. Lyte currently has about 120 employees.

 

 "We are continuously sold out all of our silicon, chips and hardware," co-founder Alexander Shpunt said in an interview, adding that demand picked up soon after the company came out of stealth mode in January. "The world of physical AI has been progressing very rapidly and what we see is that the dominant learning approach is moving from imitation learning to simulation learning, which is where we fit in."

 Lyte did not disclose current customers, but said it is working with a handful of high-profile clients. The technology is actively deployed in different forms of robotics, such as humanoids and mobile robots, the company said.

 Sunnyvale, California-based Lyte was founded by three former Apple employees - Shpunt, Arman Hajati and Yuval Gerson - who played a major role in building the depth-sensing and perception technology that Face ID uses to capture faces. Earlier, Shpunt co-founded and served as chief technology officer of the 3D-sensing technology provider PrimeSense, which Apple acquired in 2013 for $350 million, laying the groundwork for Face ID. Gerson also worked at PrimeSense before the Apple takeover.

 Lyte's flagship product includes three sensor types: a camera, inertial motion sensing and a so-called 4D sensor, which measures distance and velocity. The system then collects the location and visual data together in one platform to serve what the company calls the "visual brain" for robotics.

 Part of Lyte's strategy to stand out in an emerging segment is building custom silicon, optics and software that work together to pull multiple types of sensor data together into one live picture of what's happening around the robot. Although the AI robotics market is projected to reach $125 billion by 2030, more than 60% of industrial companies lack experience in implementing robotic automation, according to McKinsey & Co. Inc.

 Integrating sensors can take years before a product is ready. Lyte's pitch is that it can simplify this by offering a plug-and-play solution, in which sensors and other components are built in with one infrastructure. The company said it is also focused on creating fast solutions, as well as safe ones, for robotics, which don't always go hand in hand. 

 "If you are slow, you cannot be commercially viable," Shpunt said, adding that it can sometimes come at a cost to safety. "But we let the robotics be safe, fast and aware - and that is achieved by us starting from the physical world and capturing it with the platform, bringing the robotic data and serving it in a way that the brain can understand it."