Cibby Pulikkaseril, cofounder of LiDAR company Baraja, has closed a $3.5 million seed round for his new startup Zabidou, which uses cameras and lasers to inspect products as they come off factory production lines, Forbes Australia reported.
The raise marks a second act for a founder whose first company went from a high valuation to a reported write-off. Zabidou applies similar sensing technology to a far less glamorous market, industrial quality control, where manufacturers already pay people to check output by eye.
The first company
Baraja developed a new type of LiDAR, the laser-based sensing used to help autonomous vehicles see. It reached a $300 million valuation in 2021. Long commercialisation timelines and a crowded market followed, and about two years later the company cut 75% of its staff. By 2024 some investors had reportedly marked their holdings in Baraja to zero.
The new product
Zabidou installs cameras and lasers at the end of a production line to check materials such as steel and concrete in real time. Pulikkaseril has described the split simply: “The camera that we use is the vision, and the lasers give us the touch.”
The company has been deployed at 15 sites across six customers, and is reportedly about half the cost of a human operator. Its first customer makes railway support beams and its second makes pet food, according to Forbes Australia.
The raise
Black Nova, Main Sequence and Antler led the seed round, which follows a $1.3 million pre-seed. Main Sequence also backed Pulikkaseril at Baraja, making Zabidou a repeat bet on the same founder.
Jack’s take
The tech was never really what failed at Baraja. The market wasn’t ready to pay for it. This time he is building for customers who can pay today, in factories that already have a quality problem costing them money, which is a much shorter path to revenue than waiting for self-driving cars.