The round now totals €50m, including backing from initial Series C investors Sinovation Ventures and Xiaomi, together with international investors from North America, Europe and Japan that includes Intel Capital, Robert Bosch Venture Capital, 360 Capital, iBionext, and the European Investment Bank.
With this latest investment round, Prophesee has become the EU’s most well-funded fabless semiconductor start-up, having raised a total of $127m since its founding in 2014.
Prosperity7 Ventures is the diversified growth global fund of Aramco Ventures - a subsidiary of Saudi Aramco – and currently has $1bn under management and holds diversified investments across various sectors, including in deep tech and bio-science companies.
“Gaining the support of such a substantial investor as Prosperity7 adds another globally-focused backer that has a long-term vision and understanding of the requirements to achieve success with a deep tech semiconductor investment. Their support is a testament to the progress achieved and the potential that lies ahead for Prophesee,” said Luca Verre, co-founder and CEO of Prophesee.
The new round is intended to help the company accelerate the development and commercialisation of its next generation hardware and software products, as well as position it to address new and emerging market opportunities in semiconductors, industrial, robotics, IoT and mobile devices, as well as further scale the business.
“Prophesee is leading the development of a very unique solution that has the potential to revolutionise and transform the way motion is captured and processed,” noted Aysar Tayeb, the Executive Managing Director at Prosperity7. “The company has established itself as a clear leader in applying neuromorphic methods to computer vision with its revolutionary event-based Metavision sensing and processing approach. With its fundamentally differentiated AI-driven sensor solution and its fast-growing ecosystem of more than 5,000 developers using its technology, we believe Prophesee is well-positioned to enable paradigm-shift innovation that brings new levels of safety, efficiency and sustainability to various market segments, including smartphones, automotive, AR/VR and industrial automation.”
Prophesee’s technology enables machines to see and is described as a fundamental shift from traditional camera methods and aligns directly with the increasing need for more efficient ways to capture and process the dramatic increase in the volume of video input.
By utilising neuromorphic techniques to mimic the way that human brain and eye work, Prophesee’s event-based Metavision technology significantly reduces the amount of data needed to capture information. Among the benefits of the sensor and AI technology are ultra-low latency, robustness to challenging lighting conditions, energy efficiency, and low data rate making it well-suited for a broad range of applications.
The company’s partnership with Sony has resulted in a next generation HD vision sensor that combines Sony's CMOS image sensor technology with Prophesee's Metavision sensing technology, while it has established commercial partnership with other leading machine vision suppliers such as Lucid, Framos, Imago and Century Arks.
Its open-source model for accessing its software and development tools has enabled a fast-growing community of 5,000+ developers.
