Israeli Holographic Startup Raises $5.4 Million

PxE Holographic Imaging, which develops holographic imaging cameras, has secured $5.4 million seed funding led by KDT – Koch Disruptive Technologies (the technology investment arm of Koch Industries) and M Ventures, the venture investment arm of the science and technology company Merck KGaA.

The latest funding round adds to the initial Pre-Seed investment by M Ventures, which together with several non-diluted grants, brings the total investment in the company to $6.5 million since its inception.

According to PxE, its holographic imaging technology makes it possible to acquire a high-resolution colour image combined with an infrared image and a pixel-level depth map in a single snapshot that has 3x the light sensitivity of a standard camera. In contrast to other 3D imaging solutions, PxE’s passive, white-light holography approach delivers accurate depth data at distances ranging from micrometres to hundreds of meters. The camera is based on a single, standard CMOS image sensor combined with a layer of holographic optics.

Light passing through standard refractive optics in an SLR (single-lens reflex) camera can be best modelled by describing the light emitted from a source or reflected from a point on the surface of an object as a ray. The ray is depicted as an arrow, with the arrowhead showing the direction of travel, so that the ray passing from one medium to another, air to glass or glass to air in the case of a lens, must travel in straight lines and can only change direction at the boundaries between air-glass or glass-air.

The ray model of light propagation is good at handling imaging systems where only the amplitude of the light falling on a light-sensitive medium is recorded – such as photographic film – but does not take into account the phase relation between the rays of light.

Systems which record the phase as well as the amplitude are better described using a model which treats light as if it were a wave – much as sound passing through air or ripples passing through water, but with one major exception. Whereas sound must have air to propagate and ripples need water to pass through, light is self-propagating so that it doesn’t need a medium to disturb and can move through space – which is just as well because if it didn’t, light would not reach the Earth from the Sun.

PxE claims that its technology treats light more like a wave rather than a ray, and that the captured holograms are decoded in real time by their proprietary algorithm that has a computational footprint similar to that of a standard camera’s image signal processor (ISP).

PxE Holographic Imaging was established in 2019 by tech innovator CEO Yoav Berlatzky and CTO Yanir Hainick, a graduate from the prestigious ‘Talpiot’ training programme.

‘We are very happy that we were able to team up with great investors like KDT and M Ventures on our journey to reinvent digital imaging and sensing,’ said Berlatzky. ‘The current funding round allows us to accelerate our current efforts and partner with more customers to integrate the enhanced capabilities of PxE cameras into their products.’