40 million euros for eyeo

The Dutch DeepTech eyeo has closed a Series A financing round of 40 million euros. This brings the company's total financing to 55 million euros. The round is led by Innovation Industries. Existing investors such as imec.xpand, Invest-NL Deep Tech Fund, QBIC, High-Tech Gründerfonds and Brabant Development Agency are also involved.

eyeo intends to use the capital to bring its nanophotonic sensor technology into series production and accelerate international commercialization.

New sensor technology aims to eliminate 70 percent light loss

According to the company, practically every image sensor used today (including in smartphones, autonomous vehicles, XR devices and smart city applications) is based on a technical principle that loses a large proportion of the incident light. Conventional color filters block parts of the light, causing around 70 percent of the light information to be lost.

eyeo uses its own technology called NCOS instead. Light is not filtered, but split into its color components and directed to the respective pixels. According to the company, this triples the light sensitivity, while at the same time enabling higher resolutions and more precise color representations.

The technology is compatible with existing CMOS sensor platforms and is intended to enable particularly compact high-performance sensors.

Focus on series production and global OEM partnerships

With the new financing, eyeo primarily intends to expand its development and production capacities. Plans include the establishment of an engineering team at the new sensor design center in Antwerp and the development of new image sensors based on 3D stacked CMOS technology.

At the same time, the company is working on expanding international partnerships with OEMs from the smart city, industrial, XR and mobile sectors.

Imaging market with billions in potential

eyeo is addressing a global imaging market with a volume of around 30 billion US dollars. In future, the technology is to be used in numerous devices ranging from smartphone cameras to autonomous systems and industrial applications.

The company refers to a total of 26 patents relating to its nanophotonic platform. The technology was developed over several years together with the Belgian research center imec. eyeo has its headquarters on the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven and also operates a sensor design center in Antwerp.