Cepton Technologies announced that it has raised over US$50 million in Series C funding. This brings Cepton’s total funding to nearly US$100 million, providing a strong foundation to substantially ramp up its R&D efforts, expand its footprint in the automotive market and support major customers worldwide.

The latest funding round was led by automotive lighting system developer Koito, the automotive Tier 1 and world-leading provider of automotive lighting systems. As part of the transaction, Koito will obtain non-exclusive rights to manufacture and sell Cepton’s Lidar sensor design for an automotive application, using key components supplied by Cepton.

Cepton's patented Micro Motion Technology (MMT™), according to the company, is enables a mirrorless, frictionless and rotation-free Lidar solution to increase the reliability and manufacturability of the product. With the new funding, the company aims to accelerate development and deployment of its advanced Lidar technology in ADAS applications, in autonomous vehicle applications, as well as in smart cities, intelligent transportation systems (ITS) and security.

Dr. Jun Pei, co-founder and CEO of Cepton. “With this latest investment round, the year 2020 is poised to be truly transformational for Cepton’s future, and we are excited to welcome Koito not just as an investor but also as a technology and manufacturing partner. Combining Koito’s world leadership in automotive lighting and their world-class quality, reliability and manufacturing with Cepton’s award-winning lidar solutions presents a tremendous opportunity to make deep inroads into the automotive market.”