Technology

Robots need cameras, depth, and motion sensors to agree about what is happening at the same instant. Lyte builds that perception stack from its own silicon up: LyteVision fuses coherent 4D vision, high-resolution imaging, and inertial sensing on one synchronized timeline, so robots can track position and motion without reconstructing it later in software. Since emerging from stealth in January, the Sunnyvale company says it has entered production and is shipping to inspection, logistics, and manufacturing customers. Maverick Silicon led the $165M Series C at a $1.6B post-money valuation, with Fidelity, Atreides, Key1, and Ora Global among the investors; total funding is now $272M. The money scales production and hiring across silicon, software, optics, manufacturing, operations, and go-to-market.

Brian Hinman has done this three times already — he co-founded PictureTel at 22, then Polycom, then 2Wire, each of which grew past $500M in annual revenue. His fourth company argues that the ceiling on enterprise drones isn’t intelligence, it’s stamina: most multirotors were designed for short flights close to the operator, so the useful work stops when the battery does. SiFly’s Q12 holds a Guinness World Record for the longest flight by an electric multirotor in its weight class — 3 hours, 11 minutes, 54 seconds on a single charge — and the aircraft is rated for 180 minutes aloft, 120 miles of range, and a 10-pound payload at up to 60 mph. Shield Capital led the $20M Series A with Qudit, BBK Capital, and Alumni Ventures joining; the money scales Q12 manufacturing and pushes DronePort, the company’s multi-drone ground infrastructure, toward field validation. The local piece worth watching: SiFly is negotiating a lease on a 15,000-square-foot Sunnyvale plant to build roughly 1,000 aircraft in 2027, with the first revenue-generating deliveries targeted for the first quarter. Hinman is unusually candid about the limits of building American — the Q12’s motors come from China because assembling them domestically would cost about three times as much, and NDAA compliance turns on cameras and radios rather than motors.

Designing a chip is still mostly people running tools by hand, and the people who know how are the bottleneck. Agentrys sells the argument that the fix isn’t another vendor’s fixed agent but an agentic workforce each chipmaker builds and keeps: its Studio platform trains self-improving agents on a customer’s own designs, on the tools they already license, inside infrastructure they control, so the learning compounds in-house instead of in a vendor’s model. It has the demos to argue the ceiling is high — a multi-agent workflow that carried a 32-bit CPU from written spec to sign-off-clean GDS layout with no human in the loop, and better than 90% accuracy on NVIDIA’s public CVDP verification benchmark. Founder and CEO Mark Ren spent nearly three decades on EDA and AI research at IBM and NVIDIA, where he led ChipNeMo, the first industrial large language model for chip design; the founding team pulls from NVIDIA, Meta, AMD, Samsung, Google, and Siemens EDA. Etna Labs led an oversubscribed $19.1M seed on top of a $5.4M pre-seed led by MediaTek, the company’s first strategic backer, and the money goes to hiring, agent-native tooling, and customer work in verification and physical design. Several top fabless chipmakers, a global foundry, and a set of chip startups are already engaged; the company hires in San Jose, Austin, and Taiwan.

Most self-driving companies chase the hardest version of the problem. Gatik picked the boring one on purpose: the short, repeated hauls between a retailer's distribution center and its stores, run over and over on the same roads until the route is effectively memorized. That focus has made it one of the few autonomous companies with a real book of business — more than $600M in contracted revenue, 85,000 fully driverless orders delivered at 99% on-time, and trucks running with nobody in the cab for Walmart, Kroger, Tyson Foods, Loblaw, and a PepsiCo deployment of 41 driverless trucks across Dallas, Phoenix, and Northwest Arkansas. The Qatar Investment Authority and Koch Disruptive Technologies co-led the $200M Series D, with Millennium Management, ARK Invest, and Intact Private Capital joining, taking the company to roughly $500M raised since it left stealth in 2019. Co-founder and CEO Gautam Narang plans to hire past the current 350-person team and grow the fleet from dozens of driverless trucks to thousands.

Digital chip design got automated decades ago; analog never did, and it is still largely drawn by hand by a shrinking population of specialists. Celera's answer is Nesto, a patented library of digital twins of analog functions that lets software do the work — the company says it can deliver full-custom or standard analog parts in a fraction of the time a traditional semiconductor company takes. Maverick Silicon, already Celera's largest investor, funded the entire $30M Series B on its own. The money accelerates the AI design-automation roadmap and customer projects, and expands the SiliconGate product-development and design-automation team in Portugal that Celera acquired, alongside new analog and AI design hires in California under CEO Patrick Brockett.

Most warehouses still reconcile inventory by hand. Corvus sends autonomous drones through active aisles instead, capturing inventory without markers, beacons, or human operators. The Mountain View company says more than 300 devices are deployed across 26 states, Canada, and Mexico, scanning over one million locations each month. Catalyst Investors led the $20M round, with S2G Investments, Spero Ventures, and F7 Ventures returning and Cibus Capital joining; it brings total funding to $38M. The announcement also moves co-founder and longtime technology chief Mohammed Kabir into the CEO role as Corvus expands its physical-AI platform across warehouse drones, cold-chain inventory, and a forklift-mounted copilot.

A two-year-old Campbell company is betting that the wireless problem in a factory isn't bandwidth, it's certainty. Radio has to share crowded spectrum, so a robot arm that needs a guaranteed answer in microseconds gets a probabilistic one instead. Light Links' Wi-OW sends data as diffused infrared laser light that bounces off walls and ceilings — so it still works when the direct path is blocked, emits no radio signal for anyone to jam or listen to, and clocks up to 25 Gbps symmetrical with microsecond-scale round trips. It plugs in as an Ethernet dongle built from mass-produced fiber components rather than exotic optics, and has already been validated inside a Fortune 50 enterprise. Founder and CEO Firouz Vafadari raised the $6M pre-seed from Outlander, with Anorak, Output Capital, Mana, and Crosscourt joining; the money goes to production and to deployments in industrial automation and defense.

Sealing off a blood vessel usually means packing it with metal coils that stay there for life. Shape Memory Medical builds the opposite: a low-density porous polymer that travels through a catheter squeezed down small, then self-expands when it meets blood, fills the irregular shape of the vessel, scaffolds an organized clot, and is eventually resorbed by the body. Because the material is radiolucent it does not blind the CT scans a patient gets for years afterward — a practical advantage metal cannot offer. The IMPEDE and IMPEDE-FX plugs are already cleared in the US, CE-marked, and approved in Japan, with more than 3,500 patients treated across 40-plus countries. The money is aimed squarely at the harder aortic work: IMPEDE-FX RapidFill, still investigational in the US, is the subject of AAA-SHAPE, a randomized multicenter pivotal trial that recently finished enrolling and now runs five years of follow-up testing whether actively managing the aneurysm sac beats standard endovascular repair alone. A second study, FLAGSHIP, is a first-in-human trial of a False Lumen Embolization System for aortic dissection. August Global Partners led the $10M convertible note and Taiwania Capital joined as the other new investor, with existing backers HBM Healthcare Investments, Earlybird Venture Capital, and WexMed II following on; CEO Ted Ruppel calls the completed enrollment an inflection point for the company.