Aeva strikes lidar chip-making deal with LG subsidiary

LG Innotek, the components and materials subsidiary of South Korea’s LG Group, has struck a manufacturing partnership with Aeva Technologies, which makes 4D lidar sensing systems.

The partnership will see LG Innotek manufacturing and supplying Aeva’s Atlas Ultra 4D lidar sensor for automobiles, and eventually expanding the technology for use in consumer electronics, robotics, and industrial automation. As part of the deal, LG Innotek will invest up to $50 million in Aeva, acquiring an equity stake of about 6% in the U.S. company.

“The first part of the partnership is focused on the automotive sector,” Aeva’s co-founder and CEO Soroush Salehian told TechCrunch. “LG Innotek will act as our manufacturing partner for some of the top 10 global passenger vehicle OEMs.”

Founded in 2017, Aeva says it has poured nearly half a billion dollars into developing what it calls “4D lidar on a chip.” Unlike conventional lidar systems that rely on time-of-flight measurements to estimate distance, Aeva’s frequency modulated continuous wave-based perception technology measures both distance and velocity for every pixel in real time, Salehian said.

“It’s like going from black-and-white to color camera. We get this velocity information as a new dimension,” he explained.

Aeva says it has integrated the entire lidar system, including optics, into a silicon photonics module. This miniaturized, chip-scale design enables more efficient production and integration, particularly for scaling in markets such as automotive, robotics, and consumer electronics, Salehian said.

The company plans to put the capital from the deal toward product development and augmenting its team. “Over the past eight years, we’ve made [the hardware] super small, and we’re sticking to that trajectory. We’re going to make it down to a monolithic, single-chip,” Salehian said.

Aeva is also targeting the manufacturing sector and has struck partnerships Nikon in Japan and Sick AG in Germany. The company is also expanding into smart infrastructure and transportation, providing security and monitoring solutions at major U.S. airports, including SFO and JFK Terminal One.