Metalenz Ships Millions of its Tiny Cameras and Powers Up With $30M B Round
upstart writes:
Metalenz ships millions of its tiny cameras and powers up with $30M B round:
The cameras in our phones, laptops, and increasingly home robots and the like are about as small as they can get unless we starting doing something different, and that's just what Metalenz is getting up to - with great success and now a $30 million funding round to expand its ultra-small 3D imaging tech.
The startup appeared in 2021 with a fresh take on cameras that abandons the approach we've used for decades, basically "a normal camera and lens but small." Instead, it uses a complex but nearly 2D surface to capture light passing through a single lens, allowing the whole unit to be a fraction of the size. It's not meant for taking clear ordinary images but providing the kind of extra info needed by those cameras - depth, object and material recognition, and so on.
We've seen this type of thing before, but usually in university research labs showing one-off prototypes. But Metalenz's camera tech isn't just capable of being manufactured - they're already shipping orders in the millions.
If you're wondering "wait, why haven't I heard of it then?" think about it - did you know who made your phone's camera, let alone its front-facing depth sensor? Not just Apple, not Samsung, not Google - they all use someone else's lens and sensor stack, companies like Sony Imaging and Omnivision that integrate their camera component with a board maker, who sells it on to the big guys.
As it happens, one of these integrators called STMicroelectronics was looking for a better camera to equip a class of imaging board it has shipping more than a billion units of over the years. They looked at what Metalenz had to offer and basically said "great, how many can you make? We'll buy that number."
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