Elio Raises $21 Million to Develop AI-Native Optical Sensors for Semiconductors, Robotics, and Defense

Elio, a company building sensors designed for artificial intelligence rather than the human eye, announced a $21 million funding round led by Innovation Endeavours and Xora, with participation from Kevin Weil and Scribble VC. Existing investors UpWest and Resolute Ventures, who led the company's previous round, are continuing their support.

Sensors capture one fixed view of the world, decided in advance, shaped by what the human eye can see rather than what a machine needs. Elio is changing that: its sensors let AI decide what to capture, in real time, based on what it is trying to figure out - delivering exactly the information needed, when it's needed, instead of a fixed picture to interpret after the fact.

The technology puts computation inside the optics itself. Before light reaches the sensor, dynamic optical layers of micromirrors process it directly - acting more like a neural network than a lens - pulling out signals a conventional lens would flatten and lose. AI learns how the optics behave and corrects them in real time, identifying objects and materials by their physical signatures, not just their pixels.

As a result, a single module can do the job of many, and it keeps gaining new abilities after it's already shipped. Sensing starts to behave like software: the same unit gets more capable over time, instead of becoming outdated.

Elio can be used in any context where sensing is required. In microscopy, Elio lets researchers watch living cells respond to a drug over time without staining or fixing the sample, work that today requires destroying the sample for a single datapoint. In semiconductors, Elio enables engineers to see through a chip's stacked layers to catch buried defects without cutting the wafer apart. In robotics, Elio gives machines multiple senses in one module that self-calibrates and switches as the scene changes. In defence, Elio can detect small, fast-moving threats like drones at long range across conditions such as darkness or haze that challenge even the best conventional sensors. Across every application, Elio is expanding the universe of what sensors are meant to do - building dynamic, real-time, label-free methods that capture the complexity of the real world and allow AI to find the patterns that matter.

Elio is led by Founder and CEO Nadav Grossinger and Chief Technology Officer Nitay Romano, who have worked at the intersection of optics and AI for more than 20 years. The two previously co-built Pebbles Interfaces, acquired by Meta, then spent seven years leading the physical-sensing stack behind Meta's AR and VR headsets. Grossinger's earlier ventures include ColoRight, acquired by L'Oréal. Romano, a leading figure in diffractive optics, previously served as Chief Optical Scientist at Holo/Or, the science underpinning Elio's core technology.