Robots can be taught what to do. Lyte is focused on a more fundamental problem: helping them understand what is happening around them well enough to act.
The Sunnyvale, California-based physical AI company is building sensing and perception technology for robots, combining custom silicon, 4D sensing, RGB, motion awareness and AI software into a platform designed to help machines determine where they are and what is moving around them. Its early customer base is concentrated primarily in warehousing and manufacturing.
That technology focus is also what makes Lyte’s founding team notable.
Three former Apple engineers behind Lyte
Lyte was founded in 2021 by Alexander Shpunt, Arman Hajati and Yuval Gerson, three former Apple engineers who worked on the company’s advanced sensing and perception technologies.
Shpunt’s history with 3D sensing goes back even further. Before Lyte, he co-founded PrimeSense, the company whose 3D-sensing technology powered Microsoft Kinect. Apple acquired PrimeSense in 2013.
The founders’ earlier work helped bring 3D perception into mainstream consumer technology and later contributed to the foundation of Apple’s Face ID technology. At Lyte, that experience is being redirected toward machines operating in physical environments rather than consumer devices.
It gives Lyte a fairly specific identity within the physical AI sector. The company is not starting with a particular robot and working backward. It is concentrating on the perception layer that different robots could require to understand their surroundings.
Building the perception layer for robots
Lyte’s technology brings together multiple components rather than relying on a single sensing method.
Its stack includes custom silicon, 4D sensing, RGB, motion awareness and AI software, with the broader goal of giving robots real-time information about their location, surrounding geometry and movement in their environment.
CEO Alexander Shpunt describes that challenge as central to the next generation of robotics.
“Physical AI will create entirely new categories of robots, and every one of them will need to understand the world around it,” Shpunt said.
He said machines will require precise, real-time understanding of geometry and motion that is reliable enough for them to act on, describing Lyte’s ambition as becoming the “perception foundation” for that future.
The company’s initial commercial focus offers an indication of where it is putting that thesis to work first. Warehousing and manufacturing currently account for the majority of its early customers.
Lyte spent years out of public view
Despite being founded in 2021, Lyte remained in stealth until earlier in 2026.
When it emerged, the company disclosed that it had already raised $107 million through its Series A and Series B rounds.
Its latest financing has now pushed that figure considerably higher.
Lyte has raised $165 million in Series C funding at a $1.6 billion post-money valuation, taking its total capital raised to $272 million.
The round was led by Maverick Silicon. Fidelity Management and Research Co., which had led Lyte’s Series B, also participated alongside Atreides Management, Key1 Capital and Ora Global, formerly Exor Ventures, as well as other existing and new investors.
Rather than defining the company, the funding is another marker in a business that had already spent several years developing its technology before publicly emerging.
Maverick Silicon takes a board seat
The Series C also changes Lyte’s board.
Andrew Homan, managing partner at Maverick Silicon, has joined Lyte’s board of directors following the investment.
Homan said Maverick views Lyte as building a foundational sensing platform that could allow a broad range of robots to perceive and understand their surroundings. He also pointed to the breadth of early customer demand as a factor behind the firm’s conviction in the company.
That breadth will be important to Lyte’s larger proposition. The company is effectively betting that perception can become a reusable technology layer across different robotic systems rather than remaining tightly coupled to one machine or application.
Physical AI investment is accelerating
Lyte is also emerging at a time when investment in physical AI has risen sharply.
Global venture funding for physical AI companies reached $47.4 billion across 521 deals during the first half of 2026. That was almost four times the $12 billion invested across 470 deals in the second half of 2025.
Compared with the first half of 2025, when $26.4 billion was invested across 436 deals, funding increased by nearly 80%.
For Lyte, however, the more distinctive story sits behind the capital.
A team whose earlier work helped move 3D sensing into consumer technology is now trying to solve perception for robots. With warehouses and manufacturing facilities providing its first commercial foothold, Lyte is positioning itself around a simple but difficult question: before robots can operate effectively in the physical world, how accurately can they understand it?
The answer is the business Lyte is trying to build.
