Israeli Short-Wave-Infra-Red (SWIR) sensing technology developer TriEye has expanded its Series A financing round from $17 million to $19 million. The $2 million expansion includes a $1.5 million investment from German luxury car manufacturer Porsche. TriEye said that the additional investment, "will help speed up development and operations by hiring more engineers."
Tel Aviv-based TriEye was founded in 2017 by CEO Avi Bakal, VP R&D Omer Kapach, and CTO Prof. Uriel Levy, after nearly a decade of advanced nano-photonics research by Prof. Levy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
The camera sensors being developed by the company will allow Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and autonomous vehicles to achieve flawless vision capabilities under common adverse weather and low-light conditions such as fog, dust or night-time. Similar to the common digital camera, TriEye's SWIR technology is CMOS-based, enabling the scalable mass-production of SWIR sensors and reducing the cost by a factor of 1,000 compared to current InGaAs-based technology. As a result, the company can produce an affordable HD SWIR camera in a miniaturized format, supporting easy in-vehicle mounting behind the car’s windshield.
Porsche joins TriEye's existing investors including Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. (Nasdaq: CHKP) founder and chairman Marius Nacht, and Grove Ventures whose founding partner Dov Moran serves as TriEye's chairman.
Bakal told "Globes" "As part of our business activities, we are pushing to significantly shorter the period of time that it will take TriEye to reach the market with a product that will be installed in cars and as part of this interaction talks with Porsche came about. Major credit in pushing forward this deal goes to Dov Moran's Grove Ventures."
Bakal describes TriEye's investment as strategic, "We don't have all the brainpower and so that the product will be adapted to the market, we want to work with the market and receive the right information at the right time.
Full disclosure: Marius Nacht is the former partner of Anat Agmon, one of the controlling owners of "Globes."
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on August 21, 2019
© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd. 2019