Luxonis recently celebrated our 5th birthday of being in business and we’ve never been more optimistic about what the next 5 years will bring. In this blog we’ll review our founding story, major milestones, growth, our product evolution, and our future plans.
Founding Story
Our journey started back in 2019 when we were inspired to save lives by making bike commuting safe. Sadly, the lives of countless cyclists are lost, and many more are injured due to distracted drivers colliding with them. We set out to solve this problem by leveraging computer vision and machine learning to be able to automatically detect when a driver is on a collision course with a cyclist. Check out the original rendering for our first product idea named the Commute Guardian.
When we set out to create the Commute Guardian, we discovered that creating it with off the shelf components was extremely difficult. We needed to combine together multiple disparate pieces of hardware such as a stereo camera, processor, and AI accelerator. Finding the hardware was actually the easy part, the hard part was figuring out how to get the firmware to work.
Milestones
Discovering these challenges, we figured that we weren’t the only ones that were finding it extremely time consuming and expensive to put together a single computer vision system. This key insight led to the launch of our first products which were the OAK-D and OAK-1 that we introduced with a Kickstarter campaign. The OAK lineup delivered on five key elements that our customers required:
Embedded: Small size, low weight, low power, fast boot
Performant: High resolution, high frame rate, low latency
Spatial: Disparity Depth
AI: Neural inference, object detection, semantic segmentation
CV: Feature extraction, motion estimation, edge detection, optical flow, WARP and de-WARP
With $1.4M raised across more than six thousand backers, we broke Kickstarter records for our product category.
We quickly followed the success of our OAK-D Kickstarter campaign with an even more affordable OAK-1 Lite and OAK-D Lite which Luxonis continues to offer at an entry price of $99 and $149, respectively. We launched our Lite versions with a second Kickstarter campaign and our customers were delighted with our efforts to democratize access to AI computer vision devices. You can see a timeline of our key milestones below:
Growth
With the launch of OAK-D and OAK-D Lite, Luxonis began scaling up our manufacturing and global distribution efforts. We have shipped products into over 110 countries around the world and now hold inventory locally in our key markets which include North America, Europe, and Hong Kong for serving the APAC region.
To support our customers' growing needs, Luxonis also expanded our global team which now includes 80 engineers. Luxonis performs all engineering disciplines in house and these include:
Electrical
Mechanical
Industrial Design
Firmware
Software
Computer Vision
Application development
Machine Learning
Simulation
With over 1 million SDK downloads, Luxonis now serves more than 25,000 customers around the world. We pride ourselves with our customer support and that includes our extensive documentation and our technical forum. Drawing from these resources, Luxonis recently introduced a ChatGPT-4 powered technical support chatbot that is now fielding hundreds of queries each week.
You can learn more about examples of the various industrial applications that Luxonis works on here.
Product Evolution
We are focused on executing our product strategy which is highlighted by three key elements:
Create a new generation of hardware that is 10x better every 2 years. Luxonis will be achieving this with our upcoming launch of Series 4 later in 2024. The pace of progress in edge AI hardware is remarkable and Luxonis will continue to be on the bleeding edge with Series 5 planned in 2026.
Continually add new and improved sensing capabilities to our hardware. Luxonis recently introduced our first Time of Flight device that is available now for purchase and we are in the process of launching our first Thermal device that is available for pre-order now. We also continue to make improvements to our optics by offering a 32MP camera and we plan to introduce a 108MP option in our Series 4 lineup.
Constantly move up the technology stack to make Luxonis a one-stop shop for robotic perception and AI automation. We have been scaling up our cloud and application Hub with a growing list of open-source, publicly available, and free applications including a Counter, QR code reader, and Object Detection.
Our product philosophy is to both never end-of-life our products and to cannibalize our existing product with an always improving product offering. Our view is that if we don’t come out with new products that beat our existing ones then somebody else will.
Looking Ahead
At Luxonis, our ultimate goal is to enable systems that exceed humans at every possible task. Providing, at a minimum, parity with human-level perception means that robotic and automation systems are able to reliably assist, if not outright replace, various tasks that humans are performing today. We are inspired by achieving this goal and believe that the benefits to society will be massive. The robotic and automation systems that we enable help to save lives, eliminate grueling physical labor, and remove the need for humans to perform mundane repetitive tasks.
Thank you to all of our stakeholders who have been along for the amazing ride over the last 5 years. We are incredibly grateful for all of the support and are extremely excited about what the next 5 years will bring.
You can get in touch with me by emailing me at [bradley@luxonis.com](mailto:bradley@luxonis.com).