Baraja, the developer of Spectrum-Scan LiDAR for autonomous vehicles, announced a $32-million Series A investment from Sequoia China, Blackbird Ventures, and the CSIRO Innovation Fund managed by Main Sequence Ventures.
In July 2018, Baraja launched a novel LiDAR system that uses prism-like optics and shifting wavelengths of light. The company will use the funding to scale production, hire talent and continue its mission to enable safer autonomous driving.
Steven Ji, partner from Sequoia China, has joined Baraja’s board of directors as part of the deal.
Baraja’s Spectrum-Scan LiDAR solution is a completely new category of LiDAR technology that dispenses with expensive, spinning lasers. Everyone understands the challenges for traditional LiDAR. They’re prohibitively expensive, difficult to manufacture at scale, and need to be incredibly robust. These problems need to be solved for the fully-autonomous vehicle to become a reality, which is why we’re so excited to be working with Baraja.
—Steven Ji
For customers, the differentiating factor with the Spectrum-Scan approach to LiDAR is the ability for self-driving software instantaneously to change scan resolution and adapt to the environment, similar to how humans can control their visual focus.
The Spectrum-Scan technique allows Baraja’s LIDAR to be software-defined, meaning it can be directly controlled and reconfigured by perception algorithms in response to changing environments and driving conditions, allowing for better safety and a quicker path for self-driving vehicles to go to market.
Baraja is headquartered in Sydney, Australia, and is growing its offices in San Francisco and Shanghai. The company is currently expanding throughout the United States and Asia.