Optical System Integration Engineer

Lyte, founded by Apple's Face ID engineers, raises $165M at $1.6B to build robot perception. September 3, 2026 * Lyte, founded by the engineers behind Apple's Face ID and Microsoft Kinect, has raised $165M in Series C funding led by Maverick Silicon at a $1.6B post-money valuation. * The round more than triples Lyte's valuation from January 2026, when it left stealth with $107M and a "visual brain" pitch for robots. * Total funding now stands at $272M as Lyte moves from prototypes into production deployments with inspection, logistics, and manufacturing customers. Robots keep getting smarter models. What they still mostly lack is a trustworthy way to see. That's the vision behind Lyte's $165 million Series C, which lands eight months after the company left stealth and instantly triples its valuation to $1.6 billion. A rematch for the Face ID team. Lyte was founded in Mountain View, California, in 2021 by Alexander Shpunt, Arman Hajati, and Yuval Gerson, three former Apple engineers who worked on the depth-sensing technology behind Face ID. Shpunt previously co-founded PrimeSense, the Israeli 3D-sensing company whose tech powered Microsoft Kinect before Apple bought it in 2013. It's an unusual reunion in more ways than one: Shpunt and Gerson are Israeli, while Hajati trained at the University of Tehran before building his career at Apple. The company emerged from stealth in January with $107 million already raised and LyteVision, its perception platform, in hand. LyteVision fuses a camera, inertial motion sensing, and a 4D sensor that measures distance and velocity into one synchronized data stream, rather than leaving robot-makers to stitch those signals together themselves. For example, a warehouse robot using off-the-shelf components typically loses time and accuracy reconciling mismatched sensor feeds; Lyte's pitch is that its silicon and software measure motion natively, so the fusion problem never shows up downstream. The money and the people behind it. Maverick Silicon led the round; managing partner Andrew Homan has joined Lyte's board. The fund has previously backed SiMa.ai and TensorWave. Existing investor Fidelity Management & Research, which led Lyte's Series B, returned alongside Atreides Management, Key1 Capital, and Ora Global. "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. We build the entire perception foundation, from custom silicon to the spatial data our systems produce. This financing will put LyteVision(TM) into more robots, across more environments, faster," Shpunt said. "Lyte is building a foundational sensing platform that enables a wide range of robots to perceive and understand the world around them. The breadth and diversity of early customer demand strengthen our conviction that Lyte is poised to become one of the defining technology companies of the robotics era," added Andrew Homan, managing partner at Maverick Silicon, who has joined Lyte's board of directors. Building the perception layer. Lyte isn't alone in chasing the perception layer of physical AI. Rhoda AI raised $450 million at a $1.7 billion valuation in March, betting on video-trained foundation models rather than owned silicon. RealSense, spun out of Intel with $50 million, is chasing the same camera-and-depth-sensor market from a different angle. Luxonis, further down the funding stack with a $14 million Series A in July, sells an open-source alternative built around its OAK cameras. Where those companies license models or sell modular hardware, Lyte's wager is that owning the full stack, from custom silicon up, is what actually kills the latency and calibration problems robotics teams complain about. "Owning the silicon separates companies that define a category from those that participate in one. Lyte controls every layer of how a robot understands the world and is now taking that breakthrough engineering into production," noted Avigdor Willenz, Lyte's chairman. The AI robotics market is projected to reach $125 billion by 2030. Lyte will use the new capital to scale silicon production, expand LyteVision deployments, and grow headcount across silicon, software, optics, and manufacturing. Whether vertical integration beats the video-trained, license-everything approach Rhoda AI envisions won't be settled by a funding round. It'll be settled by whichever bet ships fewer miscalibrated robots.

Lyte raised $165 million at a $1.6 billion valuation to scale its AI-powered robotics perception platform.