Just before Christmas, French event-based vision firm Prophesee announced a major leadership change, with co-founder and long-time CEO Luca Verre stepping down and industry veteran Jean Ferré taking the helm. Ferré said his arrival coincides with renewed commitment from core investors, including iBionext, 360 Capital, Aramco, and Bosch Ventures. He also pointed to new backing from deep-tech fund Critical Path Ventures, describing this as “only the beginning.”
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“Critical Path Ventures is joining our set of established [investors], and they asked me to come on board,” he told EE Times. “We have more new investors who should be joining. Given the operational priorities and market direction of the company, all parties involved decided new leadership was appropriate for this next chapter of Prophesee.”
“We thank Luca for his contributions to Prophesee and wish him well in his future endeavors,” he added.
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An engineer by training and describing himself as an entrepreneur in AI, Ferré has founded AI startups and built a broad career across consultancy, aerospace, and big tech. “I’ve also worked in strategy consulting around the world [including] Boston Consulting Group, run air traffic management systems at Thales, and built products at Microsoft,” he said.
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Against this backdrop, Ferré asked: “The thing is, how come Prophesee with so many patents, such mature technology, use cases proven in many research papers, and industry-grade sensors demonstrated with Sony and STMicroelectronics is not already as mainstream as it should be from a business perspective?” And this, of course, he intends to address.
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Prophesee was founded as Chronocam in 2014 to exploit event-based image sensors that mimic the human eye by detecting changes in a scene pixel-by-pixel rather than capturing full frames. Rebranded in 2018, the company went on to raise some €126 million (about $147 million) and forge industry partnerships, including work with Qualcomm to optimize its Metavision sensors for smartphones and packaging its sensors in AMD Vision AI starter kits.
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But despite the tech progress and initial commercial success, Prophesee filed for insolvency in October 2024. At the time, Luca Verre, then-CEO, wrote in a statement from the company: “The company has entered a judicial recovery procedure at the end of 2024 due to a delay in our fundraising process, which we are now in the final stages of completing with both existing and new investors.”
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Just a little more than one year on, Prophesee says its financial issues are resolved, and with Ferré as CEO and investment forthcoming, the company has firmly set its sights on commercialization, targeting a “refined, product-centric, customer-oriented strategy.”
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“We have the sensor, defined use cases, and the full-stack demonstration, [including] machine learning models to software integration in platforms such as Raspberry Pi,” Ferré said. “What probably [has been] missing is the scale of the business and demonstration of value.”
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“Our technology is fantastic, but the way to make money with it…probably needed a bit of tuning, so this is what we’re doing,” he added.
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Prophesee already has its tech in AR/VR, IoT, advanced driver assistance systems, consumer electronics, drone detection, and real-time industrial monitoring, but will “sharpen its near-term focus” on defense, security, aerospace, and industrial automation sectors.
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“There are multiple companies [here] that are aggressive and convincing in terms of what they want to do and how much value they see,” Ferré said. “I’ve been on the phone with one of our integrators for Electronic Supervision System cameras, and they said, ‘we’ve never sold so many evaluation kits in so many industries—drones, manufacturing’. There’s traction [here]…this is huge.”
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“This is a different approach from saying, ‘let’s empower the self-driving car of the future, let’s demonstrate [our technology] works, and then wait for the demand in a supply chain that still has to be put in place,’” he added.
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While Prophesee’s sensors are already MIPI compliant, the company aims to make integration easier for developers. “We’re going further [than MIPI compliance],” Ferré said. “We want this to be much more turnkey; we want to make it very simple.”
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Prophesee will also look at how it is managing its data pipeline so users can better analyze and potentially merge event-based data with frame-based cameras. Further ahead, Ferré sees an opportunity for Prophesee to support AI developers building frontier models. “We won’t build the models—that’s too expensive—but we could provide the datasets, sensors, and applications to the engineers building the models,” he said. “That’s down the road but is definitely on my mind and on our agenda. I think Prophesee has a unique capacity to absorb granular data and can help to capture more of the reality of the physical world.”
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If recent event camera market forecasts hold true—Lucintel, for one, predicts a buoyant 14% plus CAGR over the next seven years—then Ferré’s plans for Prophesee and the latest funds have arrived at the right time. Ferré also noted solid growth forecast in industrial camera markets for advanced vision systems, highlighting: “The volumes are huge, and a lot of these [systems] can be replaced or complemented with event-based cameras.”
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For the CEO, focusing on new commercial opportunities and growing the company is what Prophesee will be about from here on in. When asked about acquisition potential—given the recent SynSense-iniVation merger, and myriad market heavyweights—he replied: “We’re talking to very powerful players. They are not looking to buy us.”
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“We have a great standalone story, and the important thing to do now, is bring impact,” he said. “Evidence indicates this market [will be] huge, and we are totally ready to scale: We have the sensors, we have the use cases, we have the playbook.”
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