Robotics perception startup Lyte AI Inc. today announced it raised $165 million in a Series C round led by Maverick Silicon, bringing the company’s post-money valuation to $1.6 billion.

Since its stealth launch in January 2026, Lyte now ships custom silicon, multimodal sensors and spatial software for intelligent robotics.

Vision and sensors are fundamental to artificial intelligence and robotics, allowing them to understand where they are in the world, how to interact with objects, and how to translate motion and physics into digital action.

Founded by former Apple and PrimeSense engineers who worked on Face ID and brought 3D perception mainstream through Microsoft Corp.’s Kinect, Lyte is putting this expertise at the forefront of improving the accuracy of robotic vision.

“Physical AI has a sensing problem before it has a model problem. A robot cannot act safely on data that does not faithfully describe the world,” said Chief Executive and co-founder Alexander Shpunt.

The robotics world has been rushing to build foundation models, much of which is driven by massive amounts of visual data. However, once models are trained and deployed, they depend on high-fidelity vision and sensors built into robots themselves.

In most cases, robotics platforms depend on off-the-shelf components, such as cameras, infrared and laser tracking. Although this is cheap and fast, it comes with some caveats: random components were never designed to work as a single system; they introduce delays, calibration drift, and inaccurate or noisy data.

To solve this emerging problem, the company introduced LyteVision, a platform that combines vision, high-resolution imaging and inertial sensors into a single synchronized system. Lyte’s custom silicon orchestrates it to measure motion natively rather than reconstructing it after the fact from cameras and other sensors via software, producing data robots can trust at the source.

“Owning the silicon separates companies that define a category from those that participate in one,” said Chairman Avigdor Willenz. “Lyte controls every layer of how a robot understands the world and is now taking that breakthrough engineering into production.”

The company said the financing will allow it to deploy its platform across more AI robotics platforms and environments faster. It will use the money to scale production of the sensing silicon and the sensor platform, advance its AI and perception capabilities and expand deployments to robotics companies and industrial customers.

The round included participation from Fidelity Management & Research Company, which led Lyte’s Series B, along with Atreides Management, Key1 Capital, Ora Global, and additional existing and new investors.

Image: Lyte