AEVA TECHNOLOGIES

Soroush Salehian and Mina Rezk met at Apple, where both worked on Project Titan — Apple's long-running, intensely secretive autonomous vehicle effort. They noticed that the LiDAR sensors being used across the industry shared a fundamental problem: they could tell you where an object was but not how fast it was moving.

To calculate velocity, you'd need to compare multiple frames over time, which introduced latency and errors. They believed there was a cleaner solution: FMCW (Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave) LiDAR, borrowed from radar physics, which could measure velocity directly from the Doppler shift of the returned light signal.

They left Apple in 2017 to build it. By 2018 they had $45 million from Porsche Ventures before most people had heard of them — a remarkable vote of confidence from a car company that clearly understood what they were building.

Aeva sells 4D LiDAR sensors — hardware units that give autonomous vehicles, robots, and security systems the ability to see depth, distance, and velocity simultaneously. Customers include autonomous vehicle manufacturers, robotics companies, defense and security agencies, and industrial automation customers.

Aeva also licenses core FMCW technology for integration into other platforms. Revenue is still early-stage and growing from a small base — they're not profitable yet, which is standard for deep-tech hardware companies at this phase.

The path to profitability runs through automotive volume contracts, which are large but slow to materialize.

Aeva Atlas is their flagship automotive-grade 4D LiDAR sensor, designed for integration into autonomous passenger vehicles and commercial trucks. Aeva Axis is a security and surveillance variant, used in perimeter security and infrastructure protection applications where velocity sensing improves threat detection.

Their core FMCW sensing platform has also been adapted for industrial robotics and infrastructure inspection use cases. Aeva's software stack, which processes and interprets the raw 4D data, is as important as the hardware — it's where the real differentiation becomes actionable.

Instead of competing head-to-head with established LiDAR companies on price, Aeva staked out a technically differentiated position that no one else had at commercial scale. FMCW LiDAR — the same principle used in radar — measures velocity directly from the Doppler shift of returned light, rather than inferring it from frame-to-frame comparison.

That technical moat bought them time to build credibility. They then signed early partnerships with Porsche and Volkswagen Group, which served as powerful proof points when pitching to other automotive manufacturers.

As autonomous vehicle timelines stretched out, Aeva diversified into industrial automation, security surveillance (Aeva Axis), and defense — giving them multiple paths to revenue while the automotive market matures.

Timing. Autonomous vehicle deployment timelines have been pushed back repeatedly across the industry, and Aeva's biggest potential customers are not yet buying at volume.

Deep-tech hardware is brutally capital-intensive to develop and manufacture, and every year of delay burns more cash. Aeva has diversified into industrial and defense markets to generate nearer-term revenue, but the automotive opportunity — where the real scale lies — remains mostly future.

They need either the autonomous vehicle market to accelerate or defense and industrial revenue to grow fast enough to fund the gap.

Porsche Ventures led the Series A in 2018 — a strategic bet by a car company that understood exactly what next-generation sensing technology could mean for autonomous vehicles. Lux Capital and KPCB (Kleiner Perkins) participated in subsequent rounds.

The 2021 SPAC merger with InterPrivate II VSM Tec brought in $513 million including PIPE investors, valuing Aeva at $2.1 billion. Lockheed Martin Strategic Investments joined as a strategic partner as Aeva expanded into defense applications, adding credibility in a market where DoD supplier relationships take years to build.