Lyte, a Sunnyvale startup building custom silicon and sensors for robot perception, raised $165 million in a Series C led by Maverick Silicon at a $1.6 billion post-money valuation, according to Crunchbase News and SiliconANGLE.
Fidelity Management and Research, which led Lyte's Series B, returned for the new round alongside Atreides Management, Key1 Capital, Ora Global and other investors, both outlets reported. The round brings Lyte's total raised to $272 million.
Lyte was founded in 2021 by Alexander Shpunt, Arman Hajati and Yuval Gerson, three former Apple engineers who worked on the sensing technology behind Face ID, Crunchbase News reported. Shpunt previously co-founded PrimeSense, whose 3D-sensing technology powered the original Microsoft Kinect before Apple acquired the company in 2013.
"Physical AI has a sensing problem before it has a model problem. A robot cannot act safely on data that does not faithfully describe the world," Shpunt said, according to SiliconANGLE. The company said it owns its full perception stack, from custom silicon through the spatial software that robots use to locate themselves and track motion, and will use the funding to scale production and expand into robotics and industrial deployments.
Robotics has spent years waiting on cheaper, better actuators and bigger models. Lyte's raise is a bet that the harder unsolved problem is upstream of both: getting a robot an accurate enough picture of the world in real time that the rest of the stack can trust it.