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California’s AEye, the start-up company working on developing lidar technology for self-driving cars has roped in $16 million in its series A venture round. The Pleasanton firm now has some high-profile investors in its list with the likes of Airbus Ventures, Intel Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Tyche Partners and others, backing its new lidar technology. A US Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) filing indicated that the company, previously known as US LADAR, has already raised $14.7 million by November 2016, and has been seeking a total $18.7 million in equity finance.

AEye now becomes the latest of dozens of venture-backed companies now developing lidar and related technology for what many expect to become a huge market for autonomous transportation systems over the next decade or so. Others focused on lidar specifically include Quanergy Systems, Velodyne, Luminar Technologies, Innoviz, Oryx Vision, and TetraVue, while the likes of Google affiliate Waymo, Uber, reputedly Apple and others are also closely involved.

Earlier this week Waymo revealed in a blog post that it was now going to focus on its lidar, radar and machine vision technology, and look to retro-fit vehicles made by other auto companies, rather than continue developing its own lidar-enabled self-driving “Firefly” cars. Meanwhile Quanergy's CEO Louay Eldada has recently compared the burgeoning lidar landscape with the optical communications boom of the late 1990s. AEye’s pitch is that its hardware, software and algorithms for machine vision will come to represent the “eyes and visual cortex” of autonomous vehicles.

According to the company, the system, intelligently scans a scene, focusing on its information content rather than data. By having a visual cortex behind the ‘eyes’ of the vehicle that digests information quickly, AEye greatly improves reliability. In terms of the photonics hardware at the heart of the approach, AEye is building its systems around laser diodes operating at 1550 nm – the same wavelength adopted by Luminar, while most other developers are using shorter wavelengths that can be provided with cheaper emitters.

The company appears to be at a relatively advanced stage in its development of that technology, saying that it will use the $16 million funding to commercialize its robotic vision system, and is already in early testing with large transportation and heavy industry OEMs, with phased commercial roll-outs planned throughout 2017 and 2018.