Mobileye’s founder and CTO raised $41 million for OrCam

3 April, 2017

Prof. Shashua: “By the end of 2018 the profit of the company will be at such a level, that it’s good enough for an IPO.”

Prof. Amnon Shashua

After he sold his company earlier this month for $15.3 billion, the founder of the autonomous driving Mobileye, Prof. Amnon Shashua, is ready to take off again with his innovative other startup company, OrCam.

In an interview to Reuters, Prof. Shashua revealed that OrCam has completed last month a $41 million investment funding round that gave the company value of $600 million. “Sales targets for 2017 are four times more than 2016,” Shashua told Reuters. “By the end of 2018 the profit of the company will be at such a level, that it’s good enough for an IPO.”

OrCam was jointly founded by CTO Professor Amnon Shashua and CEO Ziv Aviram, who are also the co-founders of Mobileye. OrCam developed a unique wearable device called MyEye, that harness the power of artificial vision by into a personal platform which improves the lives of individuals who are blind, visually impaired, have a reading disability or people with other conditions.

Artificial Vision for blinds

MyEye is an eye-glass mounted camera that reads text, identifies objects, and (previously stored) faces just by pointing. It’s small enough to fit into a pocket, clips on to a pair of eyeglasses, and speaks to the wearer through a discrete ear piece. The wearer can then read newspapers, books, signs, labels on consumer products, identify currency, and even read text on a computer or smartphone screen anytime and anywhere they wish.

MyEye comes equipped with facial recognition capabilities, allowing the wearer to identify friends and family who enter into the camera view. It can also read red or green signals at pedestrian crossings to assist them when out and about.

Intel-Mobileye strategy

Intel’s huge investment to gain Mobileye’s technology should bring it into the future market of autonmous driving. Intel will buils aroung Mobileye a global autonomous driving organization, which will consist of Mobileye and Intel’s Automated Driving Group. It will be headquartered in Israel and led by Prof. Amnon Shashua, Mobileye’s CoFounder, Chairman and CTO.

The organization will support both companies’ existing production programs and build upon relationships with automotive OEMs, Tier-1 suppliers and semiconductor partners to develop advanced driving assist, highly autonomous and fully autonomous driving programs.

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