More than a million chips are already riding inside solid-state lidar units on production vehicles, and Fortsense wants the next generation to see color as well as distance. The Shanghai-area sensor chipmaker, known formally as Fortsense Technology Co., Ltd. (阜时科技), closed a Series C4 round of more than 400 million yuan, roughly $56.3 million, on November 12, 2026.
The round drew a mix of listed strategic investors and institutional backers: Xintong Electronics (Shenzhen: 001388), Jingce Electronics (Shenzhen: 300567), Huarui Investment, Huining Investment, Xingyin Asset, Qingke Capital and the China-Europe New Energy Vehicle Fund, according to PEdaily. No valuation was disclosed, and the report did not detail Fortsense's prior funding history.
A sensing component with a million-unit track record
Fortsense designs SPAD, or single-photon avalanche diode, chips alongside solid-state laser scanning technology for automotive lidar. Its receiver chips have reached vehicle-grade mass production with mainstream automakers, with cumulative shipments surpassing one million units, a figure that places Fortsense among a handful of Chinese suppliers with proven volume output rather than lab-stage prototypes.
The company's next technical target is a single-chip RGBD architecture that fuses color imagery with depth data on one piece of silicon, a capability it plans to industrialize by 2027. Combining a camera-like color signal with lidar-grade depth on a single chip would let automakers cut sensor count and wiring complexity in autonomous driving stacks, a cost lever that matters as carmakers push lidar into mid-range vehicles rather than just premium trims.
A crowded chip layer inside a crowded lidar market
Fortsense sits one layer below the lidar makers that dominate headlines. RoboSense's Phoenix chip is described as the world's first automotive-grade monolithic SPAD system-on-chip, delivering 2,160-beam image-grade output, while Hesai's Picasso SPAD-SoC fuses 3D perception with color sensing and feeds the company's ETX line, rated up to 4,320-line full-color output. Both RoboSense and Hesai are vertically integrated, designing their own chips for their own lidar units, which puts Fortsense in the position of either selling chips to lidar makers that are building competing silicon in-house or carving out customers among automakers and lidar startups that prefer to buy rather than build.
That dynamic is common across the automotive lidar chip layer, where Sony, Sophoton and Adaps Photonics are also developing SPAD sensors. Fortsense's one-million-unit shipment count suggests it has found real customers despite the in-house competition from Hesai and RoboSense, though the report does not name which automakers are using its chips.
What to watch next
The 2027 industrialization target for single-chip RGBD lidar is the clearest near-term milestone. If Fortsense hits that timeline before Hesai or RoboSense ship a comparable monolithic color-depth chip at volume, it could win share among automakers and lidar integrators that want a merchant silicon alternative to the vertically integrated giants.