France's Prophesee raises millions as it eyes Chinese market

Prophesee, the world's leading provider of neuromorphic vision solutions, is looking to beef up its global presence, especially in the Chinese market, with the latest round of fundraising led by the country's tech venture capital firm Sinovation Ventures.

The French company raised tens of million dollars in its latest round of fundraising, which also attracted the country's tech giant Xiaomi Corp and Inno-Chip, an investment firm that has obtained investment from Will Semiconductor, owner of OmniVision.

With the new round of fundraising, Luca Verre, CEO and founder of Prophesee, said that the firm will accelerate the development and commercialization of its next generation hardware and software products as well as to expand market and further scale the company.

"Prophesee will also leverage the partnerships to further strengthen its commercial presence and resources in China to address growing customer demand, as well as develop broader relationships across key ecosystems in semiconductors, industrial, robotics, IoT and mobile devices," he said.

Prophesee mainly offers neuromorphic vision solutions "based on event". Event-based solutions only report back to the brain when they detect a change in the scene, or an event, so that independent receptors collect all the essential information and nothing else.

According to Johney Lu, head of APAC business development of Prophesee, for decades, machines captured motions through "frame-based" solutions, where they capture a number of frames. But as the camera is blind between each frame, each of the snapshot images contains no information about the motion of elements in the scene and generating unhelpful data, he said.

"The advanced event-based solutions from Prophesee can greatly reduce excessive data, accelerate the recognition speed and at the same time widen the dynamic range so that it can also quickly adapt to the extreme light conditions," he said.

Lu said that Prophesee's technology has great potential in many sectors, such as computational photography, autonomous driving, industrial automation, internet of things, healthcare, augmented reality and virtual reality.

For instance, it has cooperated with Xperi to develop the world-first neuromorphic driver monitoring solution, which can helped developed driver monitoring centric features such as gaze tracking, head pose, identification, and eyelid opening.

"Computer vision applications are flourishing globally and can benefit from Prophesee's latest technological breakthrough. Prophesee's advanced technology in AI and machine vision will open up more possibilities globally to enable new levels of automation, safety and efficiency for many industries." said Kai-Fu Lee, founder of Sinovation Ventures.