Cibby Pulikkaseril cofounded Baraja, a LiDAR company once valued at $300M. A few years later some investors had reportedly written it down to zero. Now he has closed a $3.5M seed for his next company, Zabidou.
The first one
Baraja built a new kind of LiDAR, the laser eyes that help self-driving cars see. It hit a $300M valuation in 2021. Then came long commercialisation timelines and a crowded market. About two years later it cut 75% of its staff, and by 2024 some investors had reportedly marked it to zero.
The second act
Same lasers, far less glamorous market. Zabidou puts cameras and lasers at the end of a production line to check things like steel and concrete as they come off it. Automated quality control, in-line, in real time. In his words: “The camera that we use is the vision, and the lasers give us the touch.”
The proof
- Deployed at 15 sites across 6 customers
- Reportedly around half the cost of a human operator
- First customer makes railway support beams. The second makes pet food.
The raise
The $3.5M seed was led by Black Nova, Main Sequence and Antler, following a $1.3M pre-seed. Main Sequence backed him at Baraja too, and is doubling down here.
My read
The tech was never really what failed at Baraja. The market wasn’t ready to pay for it. This time he is building for people who can pay today, in factories that already have a quality problem costing them money. That is a much shorter path to revenue than waiting for self-driving cars.