About Lumotive
Lumotive designs chips that steer a laser beam without moving parts, which lets a LiDAR sensor scan its surroundings electronically. Its Light Control Metasurface uses a CMOS chip patterned with tiny liquid-crystal structures that bend light, so scan patterns can be changed in software. Lumotive sells the beam-steering chips to sensor makers rather than building complete LiDAR units. Its LM10 chip is used in the Hokuyo YLM-10LX 3D sensor. The company is based in Redmond, Washington and came out of Intellectual Ventures, with sources dating its founding to 2017 or 2018.
Lumotive was founded in 2018 and is based in Seattle, WA, United States. It is listed under Photonic Computing, Edge Computing. Reported funding is $59M Series B (July 2025).
Compute Technologies
- Photonics
- Edge Computing
What Lumotive works on
Photonic Computing
Photonic computing uses light instead of electricity to carry or process information. Photons have no charge, so light in a waveguide does not cause the resistive heating that current in a wire does, though lasers and modulators still use power, and many wavelengths can share one waveguide. The industry has two quite different parts: moving data with light, and computing with light.
Edge Computing
Edge computing means processing data close to where it is produced, on a device or a nearby server, instead of sending everything to a distant cloud data center. In chip terms, edge processors are small, low-power chips that run software and AI models inside phones, cameras, cars and sensors.
