Voyant has raised $ 15 million to expand production of its small, low-cost lidar technology.
- ByStartupStory | December 31, 2021
As Voyant expects, the future of LIDAR is uncertain unless its price and size are reduced to a fraction of its current value. As long as LIDAR is a sandwich-sized device for thousands of dollars, it’s not everywhere. That’s why Voyant has raised money to produce high-performance LIDAR, which is smaller, cheaper, and easier to manufacture.
When I wrote the company’s seed round in 2019, my goal was to use silicon photonics to reduce lidar from sandwiches to nail size. However, the real challenge faced by almost all lidar companies is to lower prices. Between powerful lasers, powerful receivers, and mechanical or optical means of beam steering, it’s not easy to make something cheap enough to easily attach some, such as LEDs and touch screens, to your vehicle. There is none. The cost is less than $ 30,000.
CEO Peter Stern joined the company at the start of COVID looking for a way to turn a promising prototype developed by co-founders Chris Phare and Steven Miller into a practical and marketable product. After returning to the basics, they came up with a photonics-based frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) system (which does it first) that can be manufactured in existing commercial factories.
“All other systems are filled with many expensive things. Our vision, like all other systems, is to have chips that can be mass-produced,” he said. Said that the lack of precision lasers is enormous cost and space. you save. “What people use as a laser light source is generally expensive and requires assembly and calibration. There is a lens problem … our laser light source is basically outdated and a little bit of sesame size. It’s an outdated Datacom laser. Each of these costs about $ 5, and the laser path is $ 30, and that’s it. ”
This small scale is possible with the FMCW method, which is more commonly used in radar. Will be. Encoded with an identifiable data pattern and a continuous ray that constantly adjusts its frequency, this approach avoids many of the problems of traditional lidar schemes. And how Voyant does it, it’s cheap-it’s possible to scale below $ 100. The entire optics, beam processing, sensors, etc. are located directly on the chip.
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