Why Trucks invested in AEye

About Trucks

Trucks Venture Capital funds the entrepreneurs building the future of transportation.

• San Francisco, California, United States
• 1-10
• Micro VC, Venture Capital
• Early Stage Venture, Late Stage Venture, Seed
• www.trucks.vc

About AEye

AEye develops adaptive, high performance lidar systems for automotive, trucking, smart infrastructure and logistics applications.

• Dublin, California, United States
• 101-250
• Post-IPO Equity
• Public
• www.aeye.ai

Our Investment in AEye

AEye develops advanced vision hardware, software and algorithms that act as the eyes and visual cortex of autonomous vehicles.

Their advanced vision systems leverage computer vision and solid state MEMS-based LiDAR together with compressive sensing algorithms and deep learning software to enable the safest and most reliable full system solution for autonomous and ADAS vehicles.

Pioneering Intelligent Sensing for Autonomous Vehicles

AEye is doing breakthrough work in depth sensing and was one of the most innovative companies we saw in 2016.

The company was founded by Luis Dussan, a former sensor engineer at Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.

AEye is focused on developing what it describes as ‘compressive sensing,’ meaning the efficient use of laser ranging as opposed to simply wanting to range everything within the field of view of the system.

This MEMS-based transmitter is very efficient for data capture and also helps the secondary processing costs.

Innovative Technology: Intelligent Detection and Ranging (iDAR)

AEye is also building a software image processing layer that, unlike other LiDAR, allows their sensors to not just detect objects, but perceive them.

AEye’s iDAR (Intelligent Detection and Ranging) platform allows for perception algorithms to be deployed at the edge, meaning that basic perception tasks can now be distributed to the edge of a sensor network.

This enables real-time data collection, processing, and reduces sensor latency.

Compressive Sensing: A Paradigm Shift in LiDAR Technology

With it’s iDAR software, AEye can also adapt the sensor in real time for different scenarios (highway, urban, etc.).

Unlike conventional LiDAR, AEye uses a bi-static architecture that separates the transmit and receive channels.

This allows for the receiver to be told where to look for a transmitted signal’s return, which ultimately enables their sensor to be adaptive and focus on what’s most important in a scene.

Conclusion

Our investment was made in conjunction with Airbus Ventures and GM Ventures. We look forward to helping the AEye team in the coming years as they build their business.

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