EIC Accelerator Winner Blickfeld and the Automotive Lidar Race

In 2019 the race to put lidar into ordinary cars looked like one of the largest prizes in European deep tech, and Blickfeld, a Munich start-up founded by three Technical University of Munich graduates, was one of the runners. Its sensor steered a laser beam with a tiny silicon mirror instead of a spinning head, and the company said that would let it build lidar small and cheap enough for mass-market cars. The European Commission picked it in the October 2019 cut-off of the EIC Accelerator pilot, grant only, as the sole beneficiary of the Automotive3DLiDAR project. The EU contributed €1,838,375 to a €2,626,250 project that promised to cut the price of a sensor "from more than €10,000 to €400", according to CORDIS.

Seven years later, no carmaker has announced a Blickfeld sensor in a production vehicle. The company slipped into insolvency in June 2024, came out of it in January 2025, and on 13 February 2026 was bought by Senstar Technologies, a Nasdaq-listed Canadian perimeter security company, for €10.4 million in cash plus up to €1 million in earn-outs, according to Senstar's annual report for 2025 and its closing announcement. What Senstar bought was a maker of lidar for security fences, stockpiles and traffic, not for cars.

What Blickfeld Is Today

Blickfeld is a wholly owned subsidiary of Senstar Technologies Corporation. Senstar's Form 20-F lists Blickfeld GmbH and Blickfeld North America Inc. among its operating subsidiaries and says the deal followed a partnership in which Blickfeld's QbProtect sensor was built into Senstar's perimeter intrusion systems. That partnership was announced in Europe and extended worldwide in December 2024. When the sale was agreed, Blickfeld's chief executive Mathias Müller stayed on, and the company kept its name and Munich base, according to Munich Startup. The Munich register now lists Senstar's chief executive Fabien W. Haubert next to Müller as managing director, according to North Data.

The company website sells five sensors (Qb2, QbBasic, QbProtect, QbProtect S and QbVolume) for security, volume monitoring of bulk materials, traffic and crowd analytics. None of them is marketed for cars. Senstar's annual report describes Blickfeld's business the same way: security, traffic, industrial automation and logistics.

The Technology: A Mirror Instead of a Spinning Head

Lidar measures distance by timing laser pulses that bounce back from objects, building a 3D point cloud of the surroundings. The first lidars for self-driving cars spun a stack of lasers on a rotating head, which made them large, fragile and expensive. Blickfeld deflected the beam with micro-electro-mechanical (MEMS) mirrors made of silicon, a method that CORDIS describes as merging "the best of silicon microfabrication and established LiDAR concepts". The project plan was to place several small units around a car, so that the sensors would not change its design.

In January 2021 Blickfeld showed the car versions: Vision Mini, a mid-range sensor that could be as small as 5 x 5 x 5 centimetres with a 107 degree field of view and 150 metres of range, and Vision Plus, a long-range unit for 200 metres, according to eeNews Europe and transport-online.de. In 2019 it had announced work with the headlight maker Koito on a lidar fully built into a headlamp, and it said at the time that it aimed for series production by 2023, according to the Technical University of Munich.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

Automotive3DLiDAR ran on schedule from 1 June 2020 to 31 May 2022. Its objective was a sensor at technology readiness level 9, certified for sale (CE, FCC, CCC, eye safety and the ASIL-B automotive safety level), sold in Europe, North America and Asia. Blickfeld told the EU it was aiming for cumulative turnover of €116 million in the first three years after the project, "37 times the project cost", and 40 new jobs, according to the CORDIS fact sheet.

The final report describes engineering work rather than a launch: a MEMS mirror optimised for 20 Hz, laser class 1 optics, climate chamber and vibration tests, surround-view demonstrators and test drives. Declarations of conformity were "prepared" for CE and related marks, and the development process was set up as a "foundation" for later Automotive SPICE and ISO 26262 functional safety qualification. The team attended 15 fairs including CES and made contacts with carmakers and suppliers. A CORDIS results article of November 2022 names Vision Mini as the outcome and quotes the coordinator Franziska Abele: "Our innovation will allow for the mass production of robust, small and inexpensive lidars." It also mentions logistics and traffic monitoring as further uses.

1. Small MEMS lidar for carsDeliveredVision Mini demonstrators and test drives, per the CORDIS report.
2. Certification (CE, FCC, CCC, eye safety)PartialDeclarations "prepared"; ASIL-B and ISO 26262 left for later.
3. TRL 9 and series production for carsNot achievedNo carmaker or Tier 1 contract announced by Blickfeld or a third party.
4. €400 sensor priceUnverifiedNo public price for a car sensor.
5. €116M turnover in three years after May 2022Not achievedRevenue of €1.9M in 2022, then insolvency in 2024.
6. 40 new jobsNot achieved28 employees moved to Senstar in 2026.

The fair reading is that the grant paid for engineering that was done, and done on time. What the project was meant to unlock, a car sensor in series production, did not follow. Searches for a nomination from a carmaker or a Tier 1 supplier, including Koito and Continental, found none.

The Turn Away From Cars

The money kept coming for a while. Continental's venture unit and Wachstumsfonds Bayern led a Series A of undisclosed size in March 2020 to ramp up production and qualify the sensors for cars, according to eeNews Europe and Geo Week News. In July 2022 the European Investment Bank lent it €15 million of venture debt under the Juncker Plan, when it had 130 employees.

By then the commercial product was industrial. In November 2022 Blickfeld began delivering Qb2, which it called the first "Smart LiDAR" because it runs its Percept software on the device, for volume monitoring in mining, farming and construction, crowd analytics and smart infrastructure, according to LIDAR News and eeNews Europe. When it raised €7.5 million in December 2023, led by New Future Capital and UVC Partners, the customers it named were Levenseat, EEW Energy from Waste, airport operators and power station operators, and it said it had over 160 employees, according to UVC Partners. The goal was to double revenue in the coming year.

Insolvency and Sale

Six months after that round, in June 2024, Blickfeld filed for insolvency in self-administration, with the Munich lawyer Rolf G. Pohlmann as supervisor, according to deutsche-startups.de and Munich Startup. deutsche-startups.de, citing the filed accounts, reported revenue of €1.9 million in 2022 (2021: €1.7 million), "below original expectations", against a net loss of about €12.6 million (2021: €7.3 million), and said building the company had cost about €34.3 million by the end of 2022. The 2023 and 2024 accounts have been filed, according to North Data, but their figures could not be checked for free.

Munich Startup reported in January 2025 that the company had been released from self-administration and the proceedings terminated. The register shows a continuation of the company entered on 17 January 2025 with share capital of €25,000, down from €121,494 after the December 2023 round, according to North Data. Who held the shares after the restructuring is not public. A register publication of March 2026 names Dacapo Technologies GmbH, a Berlin holding company for technology stakes, as a shareholder; how that relates to Senstar's statement that its subsidiary "acquired all outstanding shares of Blickfeld" could not be verified.

Reports of total equity raised before the insolvency disagree: deutsche-startups.de puts the earlier rounds at about €35 million before the final €7.5 million, while Munich Startup says the December 2023 round took total financing above €45 million. Either way, Senstar's €10.4 million cash price was less than the EIB loan alone.

The Race It Joined

Blickfeld was not alone in failing to win the car. Hamburg's Ibeo Automotive Systems, a pioneer of automotive lidar, filed for insolvency in self-administration in September 2022 and its business was sold to MicroVision for €15 million, according to MicroVision's filing with the SEC and The Robot Report. The US lidar maker Luminar, once valued at $3.4 billion, filed for Chapter 11 in December 2025 after Volvo cancelled its contract, according to TechCrunch. Mass-market cars adopted lidar more slowly than the 2019 business plans assumed, and several of the European contenders ran out of money first.

The policy goal has not gone away. The Commission's Industrial Action Plan for the automotive sector of 5 March 2025 calls for at least three large-scale cross-border testbeds for autonomous vehicles and European Automated Driving Corridors, as Horizon Europe's Turkish national contact point also summarises. Sensors for automated driving are part of that supply chain. Blickfeld's technology and patents stay in Munich, but they now belong to a Canadian security group and are sold for fences, warehouses and traffic rather than for cars.

The Verdict

Blickfeld and Senstar have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.