Oryx Vision is a leading LiDAR start-up company in Israel. In Aug 2017, they announced a $50 million Series B funding round, led by Third Point Ventures and WRV. However, Oryx Vision CEO, Ram Wellingstein said, they decided to shut down their company even they still have $40 million cash last week. Now their website also shuts down.
Oryx Vision was established in 2009 by David Ben-Bassat, who created the core sensing technology of their system. In 2016, Rani Wellingstein joined as co-founder. They try to build a high performance, car durability, and low price LiDAR system for automotive. They totally raised $67 million from investors including Bessemer Venture Partners, Maniv Mobility and Trucks VC. Their LiDAR system without any moving part uses antennas to receive light as waves instead of capturing light particles with photoelectric detectors.
Autopilot market doesn’t develop as the previous positive forecast that autopilot tech would be mature in 2020. Now, more people believe this will take more several years or even ten years. Autopilot market is still a hot topic that investors still will support. However, it’s not as beautiful as investors thought previously. As a key component in autopilot, LiDAR is becoming a game of giants.
Wellingstein said in the interview [1],
“Currently, the architecture of the autonomous vehicle is simply not converging, so a venture-backed company will not be able to justify the investment that will still be needed”