“I’m a nerd. Let me start there,” said Eric Aguilar.
Aguilar spent his entire career integrating sensors into robots, working at Raytheon and later Tesla to build robots that could understand and navigate their environments. Trent Huang did the same at Google.
“It’s through that latter part of my career where I realized there’s still a significant gap in what robots need to see to understand their world, and what the reality is on sensor capabilities today,” Aguilar said.
Together, Aguilar and Huang built Omnitron Sensors, a Westwood-based semiconductor startup that announced on Thursday it raised around $13 million in series A funding. The round was led by Corriente Advisors with additional participation from Omnitron’s veteran investor L’ATTITUDE Ventures.
Omnitron Sensors is tackling a problem the electric vehicle world needs to solve. Light detection and ranging (LiDAR) subsystems (which allow cars, robots, space satellites, ships and drones to more accurately map and navigate through their environments) have a reliability problem. The lasers, mirrors and lenses have to be aligned at sub-micron level tolerances, meaning the deviation in measurements has to be smaller than the width of human hair. Putting that delicate a system in, say, a car – which is subject to wild temperature changes in the air and in the vehicle, as well as the various bumps and potholes that make up Los Angeles roads – can result in the sensor losing calibration.
“That fundamentally needs to be addressed in order to get (LiDAR sensors) into the market,” Aguilar said. “And that’s why we created this company, to kind of try to figure that out.”
Omnitron’s intellectual property allows them to build a micro electrical mechanical system (MEMS) device that can make those sensors more reliable.
A popular investment category
After spending decades in software and cloud technology, it looks like venture firms are coming back down to Earth and pushing more money into hardware investments. Crosscut Ventures, a Santa Monica-based seed funding firm, announced a new partner in Jon Ylvisaker as the company pivoted into frontier technologies, including hard tech.
“Venture has become almost exclusively and synonymously considered as like software investing,” Ylvisaker told the Business Journal in December. “And I think there’s a new paradigm where, as software does eat the world, there will be new atoms-based solutions.”
According to Pitchbook, venture investments in electric vehicles are largely going into hardware innovations rather than software innovations. Hardware in the EV space has raised a total of $145.58 billion, compared to $99 billion raised by software firms.
“The bottleneck in the advancements of robotics, artificial intelligence and integrating robots into the real world requires significant advancements in hardware,” Aguilar said. “And VCs are tapping into that. We’re seeing an influx in investment in our ecosystem.”
But investing in hardware is a different beast for venture firms. Software moves faster and is more nimble, and it’s easier to deduce how successful a software rollout will perform and what the return on investment will look like. Omnitron, on the other hand, will take anywhere from 18 to 24 months to see revenue.
“There’s also been a little bit of reeducating the investment community because in harder tech you don’t realize revenue until you’re in volume production, which is what we’re going through right now,” Aguilar said.
