Dual Camera Maker Corephotonics Receives $15 Million Investment From Samsung, Foxconn, Others

Israeli firm Corephotonics, specialised in making dual camera setups for smartphones, has managed to raise a whopping $15 million in a funding round. The biggest investors in the company include Foxconn, Samsung, and MediaTek. The investment is significant as it indicates the importance being placed on dual camera setups, seen in such smartphones as the iPhone 7 Plus and the Huawei Mate 9.

According to Israeli publication Globes, the company says it will use the fresh investment along with current cash to develop next generation smartphone cameras, apart from increasing the penetration of existing products. Th funding will supposedly also help the company make its foray into the automotive, drone, surveillance, and action camera markets.

The company, which currently has 50 employees, will reportedly also recruit "dozens of engineers" for its Tel Aviv headquarters, apart from support and integration engineers in China and South Korea. It will also look to acquire complementary companies that work on the same imaging technologies.

This brings the total funds raised by the company to $50 million. Investors in the company also include, Magma VC, Amiti Ventures, Chinese billionaire Li Ka-shing and Solina Chau's Horizon Ventures, OurCrowd, SanDisk, Chinese telephony services provider CK Telecom, and other private investors.

Corephotonics was founded in 2012 by electro-optics professor at Tel Aviv University David Mendlovic, imaging expert Gal Shabtay and entrepreneur Eran Kali. The company specialises in dual camera technology, inevitably bringing features that are found on professional cameras, to portable smartphones. Alongside the launch of the iPhone 7 Plus last year - an unveiling by a major manufacturer that truly heralded the birth of dual camera setups - Kali said that Corephotonics is "the inventor of the computational dual camera for smartphones," a concept derived from its own IPs. It will be interesting to see how this technology is taken forward.