Lyte, a company focused on physical AI perception technology, has announced a $165 million Series C funding round led by Maverick Silicon, valuing the company at $1.6 billion post-money.
Lyte designs custom chips, multimodal sensors, and spatial software that robots use to sense their own position and detect movement around them, a full technology stack the company has developed and owns starting from the transistor level up. Since coming out of stealth mode in January 2026, Lyte has moved into production and is already shipping products to leading robotics customers across inspection, logistics, and manufacturing industries. The company's perception platform, LyteVision, was named a CES 2026 Best of Innovation honoree in the robotics category.
Lyte was founded by former Apple and PrimeSense engineers whose earlier work helped bring 3D perception technology into mainstream use through Microsoft's Kinect, and later became foundational to Apple's Face ID, technology now used by more than a billion people worldwide.
Alexander Shpunt, CEO and co-founder of Lyte, said physical AI has a sensing problem before it has a modeling problem, since a robot can't safely act on data that doesn't accurately reflect the real world. He said Lyte builds the entire perception foundation itself, from custom silicon through to the spatial data its systems produce, and that this funding will help put LyteVision into more robots, across more environments, more quickly.
Most robotics platforms today assemble their perception systems from off-the-shelf components that were never designed to work together as a single integrated system, and end up paying the cost in latency, calibration drift (sensors gradually losing accuracy over time), and data that's difficult to fully trust. LyteVision instead combines 4D coherent vision, high-resolution imaging, and inertial sensing (which tracks motion and orientation) onto a single synchronized timeline. Built on Lyte's own custom silicon, the system measures position and motion directly in hardware rather than reconstructing them afterward in software, producing data robots can act on with more confidence.
Andrew Homan, managing partner at Maverick Silicon, who has joined Lyte's board of directors as part of the investment, said Lyte is building a foundational sensing platform that lets a wide range of robots perceive and understand their surroundings. He said the breadth and diversity of early customer demand strengthens his firm's conviction that Lyte is positioned to become one of the defining technology companies of the robotics era.
Avigdor Willenz, Lyte's chairman, said owning the underlying silicon is what separates companies that define a new technology category from those that merely participate in one. He said Lyte controls every layer of how a robot understands the world, and is now bringing that engineering into full production.
Lyte plans to use the new funding to scale up production of its sensing silicon and LyteVision platform, further develop its AI and perception capabilities, and expand deployments with robotics companies and industrial customers. The company expects to grow its team substantially over the coming year, hiring across silicon design, software, optics, manufacturing, operations, and go-to-market functions, including senior leadership roles.
The funding round included participation from Fidelity Management & Research Company, which previously led Lyte's Series B round, along with Atreides Management, Key1 Capital, Ora Global (formerly known as Exor Ventures), and additional existing and new investors. Total capital raised by the company since its founding in 2021 now stands at $272 million.
