New investment beams Xenomatix lidars down the road toward mass production

Just six years ago, Xenomatix was a garage-based startup working to develop its solid-state lidar technology. Taking its cues from Velodyne’s lidar and autonomous-driving pioneer Google, with its bulky spinning scanner on the roof of the car, the Leuven-based company knew exactly which path it didn’t want to take. Rather than incremental innovation, it set its sights on changing the lidar game.

“For so many lidar companies, the focus has been to simply shrink the size of Velodyne’s scanning mechanism. Not only is such a moving scanner limited in its accuracy, but it’s just not nice to look at,” says Xenomatix CEO Filip Geuens. “Our focus, however, was finding a way to fit within the beautiful design of automobiles and eliminate this spinning scanner, instead using discrete semiconductor technology to create multiple laser beams that build the grid without scanning.”