The Albuquerque company will use the additional capital to accelerate the development of its sensor technology, which in turn could help speed the development of self-driving vehicles.
“This funding enables us to refine our products for customers, build-out our manufacturing supply chain and complete our quality infrastructure, thereby enabling us to launch products into the autonomous vehicle ecosystem in the near future,” TriLumina CEO Brian Wong said in a news release announcing the financing.
The company earlier this year announced a partnership with Analog Devices Inc., a global semiconductor company with firm ties to the auto industry.
The two companies will combine TriLumina’s advanced laser chips with an ADI-made high-speed “pulse-laser driver” that will be used to flash TriLumina’s lasers out in all directions. The technologies will be fused into a single integrated module to allow cars to calculate size, shape and distance of objects.
Such light and ranging technology, or LiDAR, is critical to the future of automated vehicles and advanced driving and safety features like collision avoidance, pedestrian detection and automatic braking.
The new round of financing included new investors such as Kickstart Seed Fund and reinvestment by current stakeholders Stage 1 Ventures, Cottonwood Technology Fund, DENSO Ventures and Sun Mountain Capital.
“TriLumina continues to execute on their vision for LiDAR illumination modules that fundamentally enable autonomous driving,” Ray Quintana of Cottonwood Technology Fund said in the news release.
TrLumina previously had received about $15 million in private investment.
©2017 the Albuquerque Journal (Albuquerque, N.M.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
