Months after raising $59 million in venture capital to commercialize its miniaturized 3D sensors, Redmond, Wash.-based Lumotive is going global.
The company says it has opened offices in Oman and Taiwan to help bring its products to market — and has added two senior tech industry leaders to its management team.
“These milestones mark a pivotal moment for Lumotive as we move from innovation to large-scale commercialization,” Lumotive CEO Sam Heidari said today in a news release.
Founded in 2017, Lumotive is one of several startups that were spun off from Bellevue, Wash.-based Intellectual Ventures to take advantage of an innovation known as metamaterials. The technology makes it possible for signals to be “steered” electronically without moving parts.
Lumotive’s Light Control Metasurface platform, also known as LCM, can steer laser light to capture a 3D rendering of its surroundings, using a device that’s smaller than a credit card. Such laser-based location sensing is known generically as lidar (an acronym that stands for “light detection and ranging”)
The company’s backers include Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates‘ investment fund as well as Samsung Ventures, the Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund, Silicon Valley’s MetaVC and Oman’s ITHCA Group.
When Lumotive was founded, the spotlight was on the technology’s use in lidar systems for self-driving cars. Since then, lidar sensing has turned up in a wider array of devices, ranging from robots to smartphones.
“To be honest, even though we have had good engagements in automotive, our primary focus has been robotics,” Heidari told GeekWire. Lumotive has announced deals to provide its 3D sensor systems to three robotics companies: Hokuyo Automatic in Japan, Namuga in South Korea, and E-Photonics in Saudi Arabia. More deals are in the works.
To address anticipated demand, Lumotive has added Oman and Taiwan to a list of corporate locales that includes its Redmond HQ and branch offices in San Jose, Calif.; and Vancouver, B.C.
Lumotive’s Center of Excellence in Muscat, Oman, provides dedicated customer engineering and program management resources for Middle East and European markets. The Taiwan office beefs up Lumotive’s manufacturing operations, sales and field application capabilities near key partners in Asia.
Heidari said Lumotive has expanded its workforce by 50% over the past year. The current tally has risen to nearly 80 employees worldwide, roughly half of whom are based in Redmond.
That expansion is driven by two factors. “One is that as more customers come up, we need to build the infrastructure to be able to support them and help them through their designs,” Heidari said. “The second thing is that we’re actually looking at new areas of design, to augment our product and increase our market presence.”
Heidari highlighted two hires: Lumotive’s executive vice president of global business, Tristan Joo, brings more than two decades of experience in optical semiconductors at companies including Ofilm, Polight and ams OSRAM. Hassan Moussa, vice president of customer engineering and general manager of Lumotive Oman, previously led Valeo’s lidar program and has more than 20 years of experience in automotive sensing systems.
Lumotive has also expanded its distribution network and its partner ecosystem. In today’s news release, Joo said the new offices and partnerships will give Lumotive “the reach, capital and scalability to lead this next phase of global adoption — from robotics and automation to automotive and smart infrastructure.”
Moussa said Lumotive is redefining how 3D sensors are built, “shifting 3D sensing from niche lidar systems to a broader ecosystem where anyone can build it, just like cameras.”
When the bulk of this year’s Series B round was announced in February, The Wall Street Journal noted that Lumotive was bucking a trend that favored investment in artificial intelligence over non-AI technologies. Months later, Heidari acknowledges that getting investors excited about 3D sensing hasn’t always been easy.
“Coming up with something that is not AI today — sometimes you just don’t get the audience, even though what we are doing obviously is going to benefit the AI revolution,” he said. “AI is like a brain, right? Your brain without your senses is very limited. You need the eyes and the ears to absorb the physical world in order to utilize your brain.”
Looking more broadly, Heidari sees opportunities for optical semiconductors in the data centers that are powering the AI revolution.
“In data centers, there are switches that connect different racks of CPUs or GPUs, and these switches today are very power-hungry and very expensive,” Heidari said. “There are initiatives in the industry to simplify them by keeping them all in the optical domain, versus a hybrid of optical and electronic types of switches. So we are planning to be active in that market as well.”
In the meantime, the semiconductor industry is taking notice. Electronic Product Design & Test, a British journal focusing on electronics design, put Lumotive on its list of the year’s top startups last month. And just last week, the Global Semiconductor Alliance gave Lumotive its “Startup to Watch” award.
“We had Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, and many other brand names in the semiconductor space in the room,” Heidari said. “It was attended by 1,700 people, all executives and managers of semiconductor companies, and we were honored to receive the award for the best startup.”
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