Israeli company Corephotonics, a leading specialist in optical zooming, announced today that they completed a second funding round, raising a total of $17.8 million.
Photo Credit: Corephotonics
Corephotonics, an Israeli company that created a unique and compact camera in smartphones to improve the quality of digital photography, announced today that they raised $17.8 million (article in Hebrew) in their second funding round since launching in 2012. Amiti Ventures, together with existing investors Magma Ventures, Horizons Ventures, and BetaAngels Partners led the funding round. New investors, including Sandisk, two device manufacturers and a Chinese mobile content provider, also joined the funding round. This brings their total funding to date to $28.3 million.
What makes their digital camera technology better than others?
The key innovation is that Corephotonics’ technology can perform optical zooming of up to five times on smartphone cameras, a longtime weakness in comparison to stand alone digital cameras, and without any moving parts. It uses a 13 megapixel dual-camera lens, one that is narrowly focused and another that has a wide angle, and synthesizes these two perspectives into one single image.
Several key benefits to this dual-camera smartphone lens include capturing objects from farther away without needing to resort to zoom because of the wide angle lens, smoother zooms during video recording, improved low-light performance, cleaner (less pixaleted) photos, and increased depth analysis.
The technology is based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 800 platform. While it is available on many Android devices, it is not available on phones such as the HTC M8. Ahead of the CES Innovation conference in January, ASUS announced a new handset with an optical zoom, a feature that Gigaom suggested could have been built by Corephotonics.
More about Corephotonics
Corephotonics was founded in 2012 by CEO Dr. David Mendlovic, Dr. Gal Shabtay, who was an electrical engineering student of Mendelovitch’s, and Eran Kali. Mendelovic has a knack for selling startups: 10 months after founding EyeSquad, a micro-imaging product startup, he sold the company to Tessera Technologies in 2007 for $18 million. He then founded and sold Civcom Inc., which develops optical components for telecommunications, to a Brazilian company called Padtec S/A.
Only time will tell whether Mendlovic plans on growing Corephotonics into a larger, more well established company, or if he goes for another exit.
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