Prophesee

Prophesee (formerly Chronocam) is a Paris-based fabless semiconductor and software company that commercializes event-based, or neuromorphic, vision technology. Rather than capturing full frames at a fixed rate like a conventional image sensor, Prophesee's sensors output only per-pixel brightness changes as they happen, producing a sparse, asynchronous stream of events. This approach yields very high temporal resolution, very low latency, high dynamic range and low power consumption, which makes it attractive for high-speed industrial inspection, robotics, automotive safety and always-on consumer devices. The company was founded in 2014 as Chronocam by a team including Luca Verre, Christoph Posch and Ryad Benosman, building on academic research into neuromorphic engineering. It rebranded as Prophesee in 2018 and has since raised multiple venture rounds from investors including European and Asian semiconductor and industrial funds. Prophesee designs its sensors and licenses the associated software stack, working with foundry and camera partners rather than operating its own fabs. Prophesee's product line spans the GenX320 family of compact event-based sensors aimed at consumer and embedded applications, the larger HD-format event sensors for industrial and automotive use, and the Metavision software suite — SDK, algorithms and development tools — that lets customers build applications on event data. The company has also collaborated with Sony on event-based vision sensors, an important validation of the technology in the image-sensor industry. Prophesee positions itself as the leading commercial supplier of neuromorphic vision, targeting machine-vision OEMs, industrial automation vendors, automotive Tier-1s and consumer electronics makers. It operates as a private, venture-backed company headquartered in Paris with commercial presence in Asia, Europe and North America.

Prophesee was founded in Paris in 2014 under the name Chronocam, spun out of research in neuromorphic engineering — the discipline that mimics the event-driven signaling of biological retinas. The founding team included Luca Verre, Christoph Posch and Ryad Benosman, who combined expertise in semiconductor design, computational neuroscience and computer vision. The core idea was to build an image sensor that does not sample the world in frames but instead reports changes in brightness asynchronously, pixel by pixel, much as the eye's retina does. In its early years Chronocam focused on proving that event-based sensors could be manufactured in standard CMOS processes and made useful through software. The company raised venture funding from European deep-tech and semiconductor investors and began working with industrial machine-vision customers on high-speed inspection and tracking applications where conventional cameras struggle with motion blur, latency and dynamic range. In 2018 the company rebranded from Chronocam to Prophesee, a name intended to convey anticipation — sensing what is about to happen. Around the same period it broadened its strategy from selling sensors alone to offering a full stack: sensor chips plus the Metavision software development kit, algorithm library and evaluation hardware, so that customers could build applications without deep neuromorphic expertise. A significant milestone was the collaboration with Sony, announced in the late 2010s, to develop and commercialize event-based vision sensors. Working with one of the world's largest image-sensor makers gave the technology credibility and manufacturing scale. Prophesee subsequently introduced HD-resolution event sensors for industrial and automotive use and, later, the compact GenX320 sensor family aimed at embedded and consumer devices such as always-on presence detection, eye tracking and AR/VR. The company has continued to raise capital from strategic and financial investors and to expand commercial activity in Asia, Europe and North America, positioning itself at the center of an emerging neuromorphic-vision ecosystem that includes camera makers, industrial automation vendors and automotive Tier-1 suppliers.

• 2018

  Rebranded from Chronocam to Prophesee.

• 2014

  Founded in Paris as Chronocam.

• Collaboration with Sony to develop and commercialize event-based vision sensors.

• Launch of the GenX320 compact event-based sensor family for embedded and consumer applications.

Leading commercial supplier of neuromorphic/event-based machine vision, selling sensors plus a software ecosystem to industrial, automotive and consumer OEMs.

• GenX320

  Compact event-based vision sensor for embedded and consumer applications.

• Metavision Intelligence

  Software suite with SDK, algorithms and tools for event-based vision development.

• HD event-based sensors

  Higher-resolution event sensors for industrial and automotive machine vision.

1. 1Prophesee official websiteprophesee.ai
2. 2Prophesee Closes $28M in Funding to Accelerate and Expand Commercialization of Breakthrough Event-Based Machine Vision Solutionprnewswire.com
3. 3Prophesee Introduces the First Event-Based Vision Sensor in an Industry-Standard, Cost-Efficient Packageprnewswire.com
4. 4Reportable, Inc.: Prophesee launches HD Event-Based Vision Evaluation Kit, Enabling Access to Breakthrough Engineering Revision of Gen 4.1 Sensorfinanznachrichten.de
5. 5SynSense时识科技与Prophesee普诺飞思达成战略合作citnews.com.cn