Israeli low-visibility camera startup TriEye lands $17 million

Tel Aviv-based hardware startup TriEye has raised $17 million for its low-visibility Short-Wave-Infra-Red (SWIR) camera designed for autonomous vehicles. The round was led by Intel Capital, with participation from Marius Nacht, co-founder of Check Point Software Technologies, and TriEye’s existing investor Grove Ventures.

Founded in 2016, TriEye is developing a camera that supposedly can solve the challenge of “seeing” in low-visibility conditions caused by dust, fog, rain, or low light. According to the startup, one of the solutions for this is indium gallium arsenide, or InGaAs; the cameras based on this alloy are used in the defence industry but are too expensive to use in autonomous vehicles.

“Similar to a common digital camera, TriEye's SWIR technology is CMOS-based, enabling the scalable mass-production of SWIR sensors and reducing the cost by a factor of 1,000 compared to current InGaAs-based technology,” the startup stated in a press release. “As a result, the company can produce an affordable HD SWIR camera in a miniaturized format, supporting easy in-vehicle mounting behind the car’s windshield.”