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TetraVue, the California based developer and provider of lidar technology solutions has acquired $10 million in the first round of Series A funding, to further boost its use of lidar technology and develop the high-definition time-of-flight flash system for the booming vehicle industry. The funding was led by Robert Bosch Venture Capital and Nautilus Venture Partners, and would now allow TetraVue to increase its work force subsequently. Samsung Catalyst Fund and Foxconn too supported the funding.

TetraVue is developing a high-density, time-of-flight imager based around a 2-million-pixel sensor and optics that according to the company simplifies the way in which a scene can be captured and processed - for example distinguishing between a rock and a bag on the road ahead of a car; something that existing sensors struggle to do.

According to the company, self-driven cars majorly rely on kilowatt-scale computer power hidden in the trunk to crunch the enormous datasets being captured in real time, and thus by combining a camera-based system based on an off-the-shelf light sensor with a simple algorithm, they would be able to make that computation far easier, while delivering high-definition imagery.

TetraVue is currently developing partnerships with car manufacturers, as well as developers of artificial intelligence software for the auto industry and other hardware makers, to be part of what it describes as the “eyes and brain” of self-driving vehicles. The company believes that the use of its flash lidar approach will also support what they call the “Vision for Things” market - a confluence of the emerging Internet of Things and machine vision which would include areas like augmented reality, 3D sensing, and unmanned aerial vehicles.