LuminWave, a Si photonics FMCW 4D LiDAR pioneer announced it has raised more than $20 million in Series B financing led by Anxin Capital, with participation from Value Capital and Nuoyan Capital.
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LuminWave recently emerged from stealth mode and demonstrated its 2nd Gen solid-state FMCW SoC chips with thousands of photonic components integrated on Si photonics platform at last year’s CIOE, China’s largest optics conference. This Series B financing supports the company to scale its workforce and accelerate its Si photonics chips and LiDAR products development.
LuminWave develops unique Si photonics-based frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) coherent detection and solid-state scanning technologies and highly integrated LiDAR solutions. It currently has two product families: a solid-state large FOV (up to 120⁰x90⁰) Diversity Series (D-Series) and a FMCW 4D Foresight Series (F-Series).
The D-Series aims at collision avoidance and blind area detection applications for ADAS and autonomous driving as well as applications in industrial automation and smart infrastructures. Its large FOV, high resolution, compact size, and appealing price make it a perfect choice for a large variety of use cases. D1, the first product in this family, was released early last year and is currently in volume production. A next generation higher performance model is on its way.
The F-Series takes advantage of Si photonics-based solid-state FMCW to provide unique high accuracy, high resolution range-velocity 4D point cloud which other ToF-based LiDARs lack. The added velocity cloud is believed to further improve perception accuracy and robustness in autonomous driving. The technology’s coherent detection nature also guarantees interference immunity from ambient light and other LiDARs. “As more LiDARs are being deployed on the road, immunity from LiDAR crosstalk will become crucial to safety. Our FMCW LiDAR perfectly addresses this issue ,” said Dr. Feng, CEO of LuminWave Technology.
“We have seen accelerated LiDAR adoption in passenger and commercial vehicles since 2021. The current products are mostly mechanically scanned and assembled by discrete components. However, we see a clear trend of transition to solid-state scanning and chip-based integration in the near future,” said Wang Yonggang, CEO of Anxin Capital, the lead investor of Series B, “LuminWave’s FMCW solid-state solution, based on CMOS photonics technology, can greatly reduce the complexity and the cost and is expected to become the ultimate solution for LiDAR sensors in autonomous driving.”