Seoul Robotics Ltd., which makes software for lidar sensors, this week said it has raised $5 million. The South Korean company said its SENSR perception platform uses artificial intelligence and “provides the highest accuracy of object detection at minimal computational cost.”

KB Investment, one of the largest banks in South Korea, led the funding round. Other backers included KDB Capital and Artesian VC, the third-largest venture capital firm in Australia. Also joining the round was Access Ventures, which was founded by Charles Rim, former head of mergers and acquisitions for the Asia-Pacific region at Google and a director of strategy at Yahoo Korea.

SENSR designed to save manufacturers time

SENSR is designed to enable automakers and robot builders to use 3D lidar without having to spend time and money creating their own AI for 3D data processing, said Seoul Robotics. SENSR is integrated with most commercially available lidar sensors, according to the company.

“Lidar has been, is, and will be around — both in and out of mobility industry. And demand for quality 3D computer vision will continue to increase,” stated HanBin Lee, captain of Seoul Robotics. “Wide adoption of 3D sensors across the industry is evident, and Seoul Robotics will be at the forefront to accelerate the growth of lidar with our software.”

Seoul Robotics said it has partnerships across the value chain, including lidar manufacturers such as Ouster Inc., global automotive OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers, engineering solutions providers, and government customers. The company has Korean and European customers and recently established North American headquarters in Michigan. David Han, a former business development director at Visteon, leads the U.S. office.

Seoul Robotics continues North American expansion

The lidar provider said it plans to use the capital to mature its technology and further expand in North America. It also plans to build on existing partnerships with NVIDIA Inception and the Renesas R-Car Consortium and bring SENSR to embedded and FPGA (field programmable gate array) systems to the mass-mobility market by the end of 2020.

In addition, Seoul Robotics plans to address the demands of industrial robotics and smart cities. The company plans to demonstrate its SENSR software at CES in Las Vegas on Jan. 7-10, 2020.

Editor’s note: Robotics Business Review will be producing the “Robots for Good” track at CES on Tuesday, Jan. 7, and The Robot Report Editor Eugene Demaitre will be moderating a “5G and Robotics” panel on Wednesday, Jan. 8.