News: Optoelectronics
4 November 2025
Voyant appoints former Valeo exec Clément Nouvel as CEO
Voyant Photonics of Long Island City, NY, USA — a pioneer in on-chip frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) light detection & ranging (LiDAR) — has appointed Clément Nouvel as chief executive officer. He joins at a pivotal stage as the company transitions from development to large-scale commercialization of its silicon photonics-based sensing technology, enabling machines to autonomously perceive and understand their environments with millimeter precision demanded by the emergence of physical AI.
Nouvel has nearly a decade of experience in LiDAR and automotive sensing at Valeo, where he led multiple initiatives from business development through R&D and production. Having seen the scalability challenges of traditional LiDAR systems firsthand, he now brings his technical insight and operational expertise to a company focused on active sensing.
Picture: Voyant’s new CEO Clement Nouvel.
“LiDAR enabled the first wave of autonomous vehicles,” notes Nouvel. “Voyant’s on-chip FMCW technology will enable the second wave — autonomous everything. But the challenges are multiple, and purpose-built solutions are required. The era of physical AI demands sensing that’s not just accurate but scalable, affordable and ready to deploy across thousands of applications in diverse operating environments,” he adds. “At Voyant, we are building the core technology that will enable these applications.”
Voyant is shifting from an R&D-driven startup to a deployment-ready technology platform designed for real-world adoption across multiple industries. While early LiDAR innovation focused on vehicles, Voyant’s mission is to bring spatial awareness to all machines that interact with the physical world. Applications range from factory and warehouse robots to drones, smart infrastructure, and wearable AR devices.
Artificial intelligence has made leaps in reasoning and perception, yet machines still rely on limited, often costly and bulky sensing systems. As autonomous systems proliferate across manufacturing, logistics, robotics, infrastructure, and mobility, the need for scalable, high-quality spatial data is becoming the defining challenge.
As the boundaries between the digital and physical worlds blur, Voyant says that its on-chip LiDAR enables machines not just to see but to understand motion, depth, and context, which is foundational for the next generation of intelligent systems.
“Intelligence without high-quality spatial data is incomplete,” says Nouvel. “The limiting factor isn’t AI itself — it’s what AI can make sense of. We need systems that can leverage the reasoning power of AI by providing them with more data for depth, velocity and precision.”
LiDAR on silicon for chip-scale economics
Existing LiDAR systems are typically large, expensive and difficult to scale. By contrast, Voyant claims that its fully integrated on-chip approach delivers a breakthrough in sensing performance and scalability with chip-scale economics reminiscent of other application areas such as image sensors, GPUs, and GPS. Key to this performance and scaling are:
- FMCW LiDAR for velocity and distance in one frame: Unlike time-of-flight (ToF) LiDAR, Voyant’s FMCW architecture simultaneously captures motion and depth — providing ‘superhuman perception’ even in bright sunlight or adverse conditions.
- On-chip beam steering: Proprietary libraries already allow a complete, solid-state system on a single silicon photonics chip. Thousands of integrated optical switches enable precise beam steering without bulky moving parts.
- Mass-manufacturable architecture: Designed for billion-unit scalability, Voyant’s photonics platform mirrors the economics of camera sensors, bringing high-performance 3D sensing within reach of virtually any device.
Voyant has demonstrated silicon performance and yield with its initial Carbon products and will be delivering the first of its solutions in 2026. Initial pricing starts at $1490 per unit.
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Voyant raises $15.4m in Series A funding to deliver 3D sensing with chip-scale LiDAR
