LiDAR Startup Oryx Vision Shuts Down

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CTech: Israeli LiDAR startup Oryx Vision shuts down. Over the past 3 years, the company has raised $67M and now is in a process of returning the remaining $40M to its investors.

The field has changed immensely since the company started its operations, and all the players in the field of LiDAR now understand that autonomous vehicles will take more time to become mainstream than was originally thought, Oryx CEO Rani Wellingstein says, “Currently, the architecture of the autonomous vehicle is simply not converging, so a venture-backed company will not be able to justify the investment that will still be needed."

The company founders VP R&D David Ben-Bassat and CEO Rani Wellingstein tried to sell Oryx, but were not successful. "There was a lot of deliberation and investors were prepared to keep going, but we saw that LIDAR was becoming a game of giants and as a small company, it would be difficult to continue operating and return investments."


Update: A 2016 LinkedIn presentation talks about Oryx technology:


AutoSens published a short company video about a year ago:



Update #2: Globes reports about a disagreement between the Oryx founders:

Over the past year, Wellingstein advocated shutting down Oryx in opposition to Ben-Bassat, because he believed that there was no point in continuing to operate in a market experiencing a slowdown. Ben-Bassat believed that the company could continue operating on a leaner format and keep the investors from losing money on their investment, but now realizes that it will take longer than he originally thought. "The diagnosis is correct. The market is behind schedule and shrinking. The situation now is not the same as it was in 2016, and I really think that there was hype here. There was a bubble, and it hasn't finished deflating. We're barely a third of the way there," Ben-Bassat added.

"I left the company three months ago because of material disagreements with Ran. I was not a party to the decision to close the company down," Ben-Bassat told "Globes." "I believed, and still believe, that there is an opportunity for other options for the company." No comment was available from Wellingstein.

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