Blickfeld, a German lidar device manufacturer that won Best of Sensors Startup of the Year in 2022, has secured €7.5 million (about $8.2 million USD) to fuel its ongoing sales growth and market reach.
The company now has total funding of $65 million, according to Florian Petit, co-founder and Chief Experience Officer at Blickfeld. The Munich-based firm also said the funding will help it “double revenue in the upcoming year” from what Petit described to Fierce Electronics as “multi-million-dollar revenue” the company already has achieved.
The new funding was led by private equity firm New Future Capital (NFC) and UVC Partners, with participation from all of Blickfeld’s current investors, including Bayern Kapital, Continental, Fluxunit - ams OSRAM Ventures, High-Tech Gründerfonds, and Tengelmann Ventures.
Blickfeld started life in 2017 with a €4.25 million seed financing round. The company’s latest product is the Qb2 industrial smart lidar sensor, which has been in mass production since mid-2023, and features fully integrated perception software within its ultra-compact hardware design to process the real-time 3D data captured by the device.
That has led to growth in applications like volume monitoring of bulk goods in sectors like agriculture and waste management with clients such as Levenseat and EEW Energy from Waste GmbH. Blickfeld’s sensors also have been used in security applications, where an increasing number of operators in critical infrastructure like airports or power stations have deployed the company’s lidar technology for detection of unauthorized intrusion.
The company is now looking to expand further throughout Europe, as well as North America, and China. Petit said Blickfeld already is seeing traction in the U.S. market, and is getting ready for more.
“We are experiencing outstanding market traction in the U.S.,” Petit said. “Companies are embracing our digital solution as it can increase automation and productivity immensely. Our solution makes especially sense for the larger operations as they occur often in the U.S. At the moment, we are working on large-scale rollouts that we expect to be able to discuss in the coming months.”
Petit added that Blickfeld expects to grow its U.S. team in the coming year beyond its current presence, with further details to come.
Emergen Research said this week that global market revenue in the terrestrial liday system market could reach more than $4.1 billion by 2032. Excitement over the technology industries like automotive, logistics, and more has drawn a large number of start-ups into the space.
Andreas Unseld, General Partner of UVC Partners, believes his firm has bet on a good one. “Lidar has been very challenging – in terms of technology but also of market fit. Most companies founded in the lidar space have not been able to face both of these aspects. Blickfeld has solved these challenges perfectly, and is looking into a bright future because they can now address a wide variety of applications with a fully industrialized, high-performance, and low-cost full-stack solution, including hardware and software in a device not much bigger than the palm of a hand.”