Outsight Split in Two After Its EIC Accelerator Green Lidar Grant

In May 2020 the European Commission picked Outsight, a Paris start-up registered in January 2019, in the Green Deal round of the EIC Accelerator pilot. The project, GLiDAR, was to industrialise a "Green-LIDAR": a laser sensor that measures distance beyond 300 metres and, by firing several infrared colours, tells what an object is made of, from steel and concrete to skin, ice and the water content of leaves. The EU committed a grant of €2,442,833.75 towards a total cost of €3,489,762.50, according to CORDIS.

The sensor was built, in two prototype versions. But by the time the project closed at the end of 2023, Outsight no longer made hardware. It had turned itself into a lidar software company in 2022 and handed the multispectral laser, its intellectual property and the rest of the EU project to a spin-off, Iridesense, according to the project's final report and the French start-up site Maddyness. Outsight's software now measures passenger flows at airports including Dallas Fort Worth, Rome Fiumicino and Singapore Changi.

Which Outsight

The Commission's list of selected companies names "Outsight Sas" of Paris, with the website outsight.tech, as the grant-only winner of GLiDAR, and lists no other company for the project. The "SAS" was already out of date: the official gazette BODACC records that the company was registered in January 2019 as Beyond Sensing SAS and became OUTSIGHT, a société anonyme with a board, in April 2019. CORDIS gives the VAT number FR22845115963, which matches that registration. The name is shared with an unrelated Brussels outdoor advertising agency that the New York firm Billups bought in January 2024; a Welcome to the Jungle job page for the Paris lidar company wrongly attributes that acquisition to it.

Outsight grew out of Dibotics, a Versailles company whose processing chip ran inside Outsight's first camera, according to VentureBeat. In February 2019 BODACC published a plan to split part of Dibotics into the new company, transferring €540,426.81 of assets and €439,943.30 of liabilities, and in 2020 Outsight absorbed what remained of Dibotics.

The Technology: A Laser That Reads Materials

An ordinary lidar fires one wavelength of laser light and times the echo to build a 3D point cloud. GLiDAR's version, based on what the CORDIS objective calls powerful laser pulses generated "using only passive components", fires four colours in the short-wave infrared. Different materials reflect those colours differently, so each point carries a chemical fingerprint as well as a position. Because the sensor brings its own light, it works at night and needs no field calibration, unlike multispectral cameras, the final report says. The proposal promised more than 300 metres of range "instead of 70m" and, in the CORDIS summary, a device costing less than €100.

Maddyness traces the laser to Scott Buchter, a researcher who had worked on it at MIT and sold it to Outsight in 2019. Buchter and Nadine Buard, who later ran Iridesense, co-wrote a 2022 Laser Focus World article on multispectral lidar that the CORDIS results page lists alongside 12 patent applications filed by Outsight between 2019 and 2021.

At launch the hardware and the software were sold as one product. When Outsight raised a $20 million seed round in December 2019, it pitched a "3D Semantic Camera" that recognised the materials of nearby objects, with 30 staff in Paris, Helsinki and San Francisco, VentureBeat reported. Tech.eu named Demeter Partners, SPDG and BNP Paribas's Energy Transition Capital as the leads.

What GLiDAR Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The proposal set out four outcomes: a lidar for makers of autonomous machines, a lidar for airborne ecosystem monitoring, "thousands of human lives" saved each year, and market leadership for Outsight in machine and drone lidar. It also claimed alliances with "at least two key Tier1 providers", one in machines and one in drones, and targeted "Half a Billion € sales in 5 years and more than 500 jobs in France and Europe".

The final report, covering December 2021 to December 2023, says the technical objectives were reached. Two multispectral lidars were designed and hardened against heat and vibration: one with a 90° by 50° field of view that analyses materials up to 120 metres, and one with a 360° by 30° view that does so up to 200 metres. Firmware, 3D reconstruction software and a user interface exist. The first version was tested by customers for airport tarmac monitoring, drones and trains, and soil moisture measurement was demonstrated; the report says up to 30% of orchard irrigation water could be saved. It names no customer and no Tier 1 partner.

The schedule slipped. The objective describes a 24-month project; CORDIS dates it from 1 December 2020 to 31 December 2023, 37 months. Outsight remained a participant to the end and received a net EU contribution of €2,076,408.25, against €366,425.50 for Iridesense, which CORDIS now lists as coordinator.

1. Building blocks from TRL6 to TRL8, manufacturable lidarPartly deliveredTwo hardened prototypes per CORDIS; still hand-built "in very few copies" in January 2024, per KultureGeek.
2. Range above 300 mPartly delivered300 m for 3D mapping; 120 m and 200 m for material analysis.
3. Customer testsDeliveredAirport tarmac, drone and train tests, per the final report; customers not named.
4. PatentsDelivered12 applications listed on CORDIS.
5. Device under €100Not achievedNo price published; no series production announced.
6. Market launch for autonomous machines and drone ecosystem monitoringNot achievedNo commercial launch announced by Outsight or Iridesense.
7. Two Tier 1 alliancesNot achievedNone named; the only announced partner is mapping firm GeoCue.
8. €500M sales and 500 jobs in five yearsNot achievedIridesense employed 10 to 19 people in 2024 and has published no sales figure.

Where the Laser Went: Iridesense

According to Maddyness, Outsight "pivoted in 2022 to focus on developing the software brick" and created a spin-off for the multispectral lidar, officially born in March 2023 and led by Nadine Buard, an optronics engineer who had joined Outsight at its founding, with Elise Chevallard, Outsight's former lidar project lead, and Withings co-founder Éric Carreel. BODACC shows IRIDESENSE SAS registered in Nanterre in March 2023 with €400,000 of capital, at the same Issy-les-Moulineaux address that CORDIS gives for the coordinator, and moving to Paris in 2024 with capital of €529,500.

At CES in January 2024 Iridesense showed the sensor as a tool for farms, measuring water stress in plants. Geo Week News reported a planned collaboration with the US lidar mapping company GeoCue to monitor plantations in Brazil. Maddyness said Iridesense was raising €4 million and wanted to move to industrial production the following year; whether that round closed could not be verified. The company files accounts: the French INPI ratio dataset shows a net profit of €648,398 for 2024 and a net loss of €197,527 for 2025, with turnover kept confidential, and the national company directory lists it as active with 10 to 19 staff in 2024. No product launch, price or named paying customer has been published.

What Outsight Is Doing Now

Outsight's software takes point clouds from other makers' lidars and turns them into anonymous tracks of people and vehicles. It has announced partnerships with sensor makers including RoboSense and Seyond. In October 2022 it raised €22 million in a round co-led by Energy Innovation Capital and Bpifrance's Defense Innovation Fund, with Groupe ADP and its earlier investors, according to Lidar Magazine and eeNews Europe. Neither report mentions multispectral hardware. BODACC shows its share capital rising from €101,483.51 to €244,839.75 in November 2022, with Bpifrance and Energy Innovation Capital's Christopher Smith joining the board.

Airports became the main market. In April 2025 Dallas Fort Worth International Airport chose Outsight for a contract with an estimated value of $17.2 million after a competitive process with four proposals, Lidar Magazine reported; Future Travel Experience gave the same figure, and Outsight's own page on the deal is dated December 2025 in its newsroom. In September 2026 Outsight said more than 280 million annual passengers pass under its measurement, at sites including Rome Fiumicino and Singapore Changi, a figure from its own announcement that could not be checked independently. On 7 October 2026 it announced the acquisition of GRASP Aviation Innovations, which makes queue control software for airport security checkpoints; the price was not disclosed.

The company still names the EU grant on its About page, which lists seven offices from Paris to Singapore. It is also a partner in a new Horizon Europe road-safety project, PROSAFE-TWIN, which started on 1 October 2026 and allocates it €458,815.63.

The Money

Outsight does not publish its accounts. Societe.com describes it as in default of publishing its accounts, BODACC carries no accounts filing notice for it, and the INPI ratio dataset has no entry for its SIREN. Its revenue, losses and the return on the EU grant therefore cannot be checked. What is public is the staff band, 50 to 99 in 2024 according to the national company directory, against 30 at the end of 2019, and a run of small capital increases in late 2025 and early 2026 recorded by BODACC. Neither Outsight nor Iridesense appears in the EIC Fund's list of invested companies, which matches the grant-only award.

Why Europe Should Care

GLiDAR was funded under the EIC's Green Deal topic, and its pitch spoke to the EU's Sustainable and Smart Mobility Strategy, which expects automated mobility "deployed at large scale" by 2030 and a 90% cut in transport emissions by 2050. A European laser source for sensing would have been a hardware asset in a field where Outsight's own software runs on sensors from many manufacturers, among them RoboSense and Seyond. Outsight's bet went the other way: it treated lidar hardware as a commodity bought from many vendors and kept the value in software and data. That leaves the European-made sensor with Iridesense, a company of fewer than 20 people.

The Verdict

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