Voyant Photonics

Voyant Photonics, Inc. is a New York City-based semiconductor and photonics company that designs and manufactures chip-scale FMCW (Frequency-Modulated Continuous Wave) LiDAR sensors built on a proprietary silicon photonics integrated circuit platform. The company was founded in 2018 by two Columbia University photonics researchers, Steven Miller (CTO) and Chris Phare (Chief Science Officer), and is currently led by CEO Clement Nouvel, former CTO of LiDAR at Valeo.

Voyant's core innovation is a fingernail-sized silicon photonics chip that integrates a coherent 1550 nm wavelength transmit/receive optical subsystem with waveguide-based thermo-optical beam steering, eliminating the high peak-power lasers and bulk optical components that make traditional Time-of-Flight LiDAR incompatible with silicon integration. The FMCW architecture also enables simultaneous extraction of range and velocity (Doppler) data, producing 4D LiDAR point clouds. This architecture allows the use of a single focusing lens for both transmit and receive paths, yielding compact, low-cost sensors immune to sunlight interference.

The company markets two product families. The Carbon LiDAR Sensor, launched in December 2024 at CES 2025, is priced at $1,490 per unit and available in 32-line, 64-line, and 128-line variants. The 128-line variant delivers 150 m range, a 30-degree vertical by 120-degree horizontal field of view, up to 1,000 effective lines in static scenes, IP67-rated housing, 250 g weight, and up to 20 Hz frame rate. Maximum detectable radial velocity is 63 m/s. Software-defined performance allows in-field adjustment of frame rate and field of view.

The Helium Platform, announced in December 2025 and demonstrated at CES 2026, is the industry's first fully solid-state 4D FMCW LiDAR using a 2D photonic focal plane array with no moving parts of any kind. It measures under 150 g and 50 cubic centimeters and supports configurations ranging from near-180-degree wide coverage to narrower long-range optics. Production is targeted for 2027 with a claimed 20-times MTBF improvement over legacy Time-of-Flight architectures.

Both product families are available in three integration tiers: fully integrated sensor, standalone photonics module, or bare silicon photonics chip, enabling OEM integration at all levels of the supply chain.

Voyant has raised $35.2 million in total funding across a Seed round in 2019, a $15.4 million Series A in 2021, and an additional round in July 2023. Investors include LDV Capital, Contour Venture Partners, UP.Partners, Remarkable Ventures, and DARPA. The company employs approximately 26 people. Target markets include industrial automation, warehouse and mobile robotics, autonomous vehicles, drones and UAVs, smart infrastructure, defense, and consumer devices.