The world has always been fascinated with the idea of robots and, in particular, the self-driving car. However, for years cars that drive themselves were just that: an idea, restricted to our imaginations or Hollywood movies. Today, even as self-driving cars are edging toward reality with billions of dollars being poured into realizing an autonomous future, they are still limited by incremental improvements in current sensing technology that is holding them back from becoming mainstream.

I left Apple’s Special Projects Group and started Aeva with my co-founder, Mina Rezk, in 2017 because we saw a major opportunity to address fundamental gaps in this still nascent autonomous transport market. The market has been asking not only for a truly robust sensing technology, but also one that can ultimately provide new levels of safety for the public. From the very beginning, we have been driven by one mission: Realize autonomous transport for the masses by creating the next generation of sensing technologies that are safe, simple, and scalable.

Today, we are proud to reveal our Aeva Sensing System to the world, and announce that we have raised $45M in total investments led by Lux Capital and Canaan Partners. We are excited to be partnered with such leading firms with proven track records at the forefront of autonomous technology and robotics industries.

Drawing from our collective experience in automotive and consumer electronics manufacturing, we have built a fundamentally new technology. One that represents a generational leap for autonomous vehicles, by combining key advantages of LiDAR, Radar, machine vision and high-accuracy motion sensing — all in a single compact form designed from the ground-up for mass scale (no separate large compute boxes or cooling mechanisms hidden away). It allows autonomous cars to see the world in ways and in levels of detail that simply are not possible today, Thanks to our 4D LiDAR technology. Only Aeva’s sensing system knows what an object is from over 200m away, and can simultaneously identify if it’s a car or a person, recognize how fast it’s going down to centimeters per second of precision, and predict what it’s about to do in the following seconds.

Over the past months we’ve been working closely with our key partners thru a rigorous process to get our new product on the road. We’re excited to share we’ve partnered with and are already shipping our product to select major OEMs — we’ll have more to share on these partners soon.

Creating a fundamentally new technology like this has required building a special team with a diverse range of expertise across LiDAR, Radar, cameras, automotive design and supply chain, machine learning software, and large volume manufacturing. We have already built a phenomenal team at Aeva that possess many of these unique skill sets, but we are growing rapidly and looking for the right people across many areas including product, business and operations to join us on our journey.

Ultimately, we believe in the positive impact of autonomous transport on our daily lives. Our success in equipping self-driving vehicles with a unique product like ours will enable them to navigate in a fundamentally safer way and this, we believe will mean success of the autonomous transport market as a whole. If we can deliver on our vision of a safe, simple and scalable technology built for the next generation of transport, then we’ll have gone a long way in realizing this success.