Israeli startup TriEye, developer of innovative Short-Wave-Infra-Red (SWIR) sensing technology that is able to see in adverse weather and night-time conditions, announced a $17-million Series A funding round led by Intel Capital.

Other investors include Marius Nacht, co-founder of Check Point Software Technologies, and TriEye’s existing investor Grove Ventures, headed by TriEye chairman Dov Moran, the inventor of the USB flash drive and co-founder of M-Systems. Since inception, TriEye has raised more than $20M, including a seed investment of $3M led by Grove Ventures in November 2017.

TriEye’s HD SWIR camera, initial samples of which are expected to enter the market in 2020, will allow Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and autonomous vehicles to achieve vision capabilities under common adverse weather and low-light conditions such as fog, dust or night-time.

Even when combining several sensing solutions such as radar, lidar and a camera, it is impossible to accurately detect and identify objects such as a cyclist at night under common adverse conditions. The defense and aerospace industries have already solved the low visibility challenge by using InGaAs-based SWIR cameras. However, up until now, these cameras have been too expensive for mass-market applications.

Similar to a common digital camera, TriEye’s SWIR technology is CMOS-based, enabling the scalable mass-production of SWIR sensors and reducing the cost by a factor of 1,000 compared to current InGaAs-based technology. As a result, the company says it can produce an affordable HD SWIR camera in a miniaturized format, supporting easy in-vehicle mounting behind the car’s windshield.

TriEye was founded in 2016 by Avi Bakal (CEO), Omer Kapach (VP R&D) and Prof. Uriel Levy (CTO), after nearly a decade of advanced nano-photonics research by Prof. Levy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Low visibility conditions such as fog, darkness and dust, and hazards such as black ice on the road, are some of the main contributors to injuries and fatalities in car crashes. In the US alone, around 21% of all vehicle crashes—nearly 1.2 million annually—are weather-related and often involve low visibility. Our mission is to save lives, reduce risks of accidents in these kind of safety critical conditions and do this in a very cost efficient way.

The funding will be used to execute on our product roadmap for HD SWIR solutions, including our proprietary sensing algorithms. We are humbled by the trust shown by the investors in our series A round, and we remain mission-focused on this opportunity.

—Avi Bakal

While TriEye’s primary target market is the automotive industry, its technology is highly applicable to a wide range of other sectors, including mobile, industrial, security and optical inspection. The company intends to address challenges and opportunities in these fields in the upcoming future.