Ex-Apple Face ID engineers raised $165 million to give robots a trustworthy sense of the world
Lyte's Series C, led by Maverick Silicon, triples the perception-hardware startup's valuation to $1.6 billion. Its bet is that every category of physical-AI robot will need custom sensors and silicon it can trust before it acts.
Lyte, a robot-perception hardware startup founded by former Apple engineers, announced a $165 million Series C on September 2, 2026, led by Maverick Silicon. The round brings its post-money valuation to $1.6 billion, more than triple its prior mark. Fidelity Management and Research, which led Lyte's Series B, returned alongside Atreides Management, Key1 Capital, and Ora Global, taking total capital raised since the company's 2021 founding to $272 million.
The pedigree behind the pitch
Founders Alexander Shpunt, Arman Hajati, and Yuval Gerson worked on advanced sensing and perception at Apple. Shpunt previously co-founded PrimeSense, whose 3D-sensing technology powered the original Microsoft Kinect before Apple acquired the company in 2013 and folded that work into what became Face ID. Lyte builds custom silicon, multimodal sensors, and spatial software that let a robot determine where it is and what's moving around it. CEO Shpunt's framing: "physical AI will create entirely new categories of robots, and every one of them" will need trustworthy perception to act on.
Perception is the load-bearing layer
Robotics coverage gravitates toward the flashiest capability, a humanoid folding laundry or an arm performing surgery, and skips the sensing layer that has to be right before any of it runs unsupervised. Lyte is betting that the more autonomous a robot's decisions get, the more its perception hardware has to be treated as a distinct, auditable component. The same logic applies to software agents: competence at the task says nothing about whether the sensing or access layer underneath can be trusted.