VoxelSensors Takes EIC Accelerator Money to Qualcomm's AR Platform

Smart glasses need to see the room without draining their battery. Depth cameras in today's headsets fire light pulses and read back every pixel, frame after frame, which costs power and adds delay. VoxelSensors, a Brussels company founded in March 2020, builds a sensor that does the opposite: each pixel stays silent until a single photon of the system's own laser hits it, and then reports only that event.

The EIC Accelerator selected the company at its October 2024 cut-off for blended finance, and CORDIS records a €2,499,999 grant for the project SPAES, short for Single-Photon Active Event Sensor, running from July 2025 to June 2027. In August 2025 Qualcomm agreed to optimise the sensor for its Snapdragon AR2 platform. The company's accounts, meanwhile, show losses that grew every year, and the Series A round it has been preparing since 2024 has not been announced.

A second run at 3D sensing

The founders have done this before. According to a VUB article from February 2023, a team at the university's ETRO department started work on CMOS 3D sensors in 2004 and patented a time-of-flight technology called CAPD; the spin-off Optrima was founded on it in 2009, with Miodezky as its later CEO and Peeters as its first employee. Capricorn Partners writes that Peeters and van der Tempel co-invented a time-of-flight sensor and camera technology that "a leading tech company acquired".

VoxelSensors keeps close ties to the university. The VUB article describes SPECTRE, a research programme funded by Brussels' innovation agency Innoviris in which VUB's ETRO and BruBotics groups test the company's Switching Pixels technology in robotics.

Pixels that wait for one photon

SPAES combines two sensor types. Single-photon avalanche diodes, known as SPADs, can register an individual photon; event-based sensors report only pixels where something changes instead of reading out full frames. VoxelSensors pairs the two with filters inside each pixel that separate the system's own scanning laser from ambient light, so the chip outputs a stream of x and y coordinates, with optional timestamps, only where the laser is seen.

The first chip is public. At the 2025 International Image Sensor Workshop, van der Tempel and four colleagues presented a 300 by 150 pixel single-photon active event sensor made in a 40-nanometre CMOS process, for 3D sensing and eye tracking. The workshop paper does not give power figures.

€9.5 million of seed money, and a Series A on hold

VoxelSensors raised a €5 million seed round in May 2023, led by Capricorn Partners and Qbic with finance&invest.brussels, existing investors and the team. In January 2024 it added €3 million led by SFPIM Relaunch, a subsidiary of Belgium's sovereign wealth fund, and put the seed total at €9.5 million, according to its GlobeNewswire release. The figures differ between sources: Qbic gives the 2023 round as €5.5 million, which with the extension makes €8.5 million, not €9.5 million. The money was meant, among other things, to "lay the groundwork" for a Series A, and in February 2024 VoxelSensors bought the gaze-tracking and projection patents of the Israeli company EyeWay Vision, Optica reported.

The accounts filed with the National Bank of Belgium show the cost of that preparation. The operating loss rose from €0.96 million in 2022 to €2.26 million in 2023, €3.13 million in 2024 and €3.76 million in 2025, according to Staatsbladmonitor. Equity fell from €5.85 million after the seed round to €2.07 million at the end of 2025, while debts rose from €1.48 million to €3.72 million in 2025 alone. The accounts do not disclose turnover.

The Official Gazette shows capital changes in March and May 2023 and in June 2024, around the two seed rounds, and board changes in 2024 and May 2025, but no capital change since. No Series A has been announced.

The EIC project and the Qualcomm deal

SPAES was selected under the EIC's 2024 challenge topics, and the Commission signed the grant on 3 June 2025. The CORDIS summary promises faster, more energy-efficient 3D sensing for real-time mapping in industrial and extended reality applications, built on the company's patented Switching Pixels technology. CORDIS lists no periodic report or result yet.

The clearest progress since the award is commercial. On 28 August 2025 VoxelSensors and Qualcomm Technologies announced that they would optimise SPAES for the Snapdragon AR2 Gen 1 platform used in augmented reality glasses, with a version available to select customers and partners by December 2025, according to the joint release. Ziad Asghar, Qualcomm's head of XR, said the work could support small, all-day wearable AR glasses. No customer has since been named.

Whether the blended award's equity part has been invested is not public: no EIC Fund investment has been announced, and the register shows no capital change in 2025.

1. Single-photon active event sensorPrototype shown300 by 150 pixel chip presented at IISW 2025.
2. Low-power 3D sensing for XR devicesPartner stageQualcomm collaboration on Snapdragon AR2; no device maker named.
3. Industrial and robotics applicationsResearchVUB SPECTRE programme on robotics; no industrial customer public.
4. Project completion by June 2027Too earlyNo periodic report on CORDIS yet.

Europe's place in the sensor race

VoxelSensors designs its image sensors in Brussels, building on the university research that once produced Optrima. The EU's Chips Act aims to strengthen chip design in Europe, and an EIC grant for a European-designed sensor fits that goal. The commercial test is whether a glasses maker puts SPAES into a product before the project ends in June 2027.