French lidar-based 3D software developer Outsight has received $22 million in a funding round led by Defence Innovation Fund managed by Bpifrance and Energy Innovation Capital. The airport lidar-based solution recently tested successfully at Paris-Charles de Gaulle is one of the company’s new customers Outsight has deployed to in recent months. The company is focused on developing lidar beyond self driving cars, in the wider transportation industry, aviation, robotics, industry, smart cities, and logistics.

The company is focused on addressing the challenge of the vast amount of data that lidar generates, and also on development and adoption of standardised solutions across the dozens of different hardware vendors.

The latest round of funding is intended to further support the company’s expansion, its ambitious product roadmap including Edge and Cloud Processing, and to strengthen its strategic position as the leading Software Pure Player.

The company has customers across a number of different markets and industries. In automotive and smart vehicles, Stellantis is using Outsight technology to process massive amounts of 3D lidar data. Other customers are active in commercial and industrial vehicles, for both full automation and vehicle safety. In smart infrastructure, Groupe ADP, operator of Paris-Charles de Gaulle, has adopted Outsight for airport people flow monitoring. Outsight has also been adopted for smart city transportation applications such as vulnerable road users detection, highway monitoring, and parking.

Outsight lidar is also being adopted for mobile robotic applications such as explosive ordnance disposal, industrial autonomous mobile robots and remote operation.

The company is integrating edge lidar processing with cloud-based lidar processing of dynamic scenes, able to process effectively the enormous amounts of 3D data that can result, in the order of tens of petabytes. This new product aims to address various use cases, such as Digital Twin applications and Automatic 3D Data Annotation.

According to Raul Bravo, President & Cofounder of Outsight, “Lidar is emancipating from its roots in self-driving car R&D to become the solution of choice in large-scale applications in mature markets, thanks to the new category of enabling software that we have created”.

Adrien Muller, Principal at Bpifrance states: “After supporting Outsight’s early stages of development through our innovation funding, we are delighted to support this new stage of growth by acquiring a stake in the company. Our investment reflects our collective ambition to widely disseminate the benefits of lidar technologies thanks to Outsight’s unique software-based approach which simplifies their use and reduces their deployment costs.”

“The opportunity for 3D spatial intelligence and autonomy, beyond autonomous vehicles, is massive and untapped.” said Christopher Smith, Managing Director, Energy Innovation Capital. “Outsight’s technically elegant solution unlocks the power of lidar for mass adoption by solving the complex, raw data problem and providing valuable insights across a broad range of applications. We are very excited to partner with the Outsight team to accelerate expansion in the US and global markets.”

According to Edward Arkwright, Deputy CEO of Groupe ADP, “Outsight’s development ambitions are in line with our strategy of increasing integration of lidar to improve our airport operations, as part of our smart airport ambition. By supporting Outsight in this funding round, we have a key alliance to innovate together around the deployment of lidar technology, which is extremely promising, both in Paris and internationally in our network of airports.”