Luca Verre
Organisation: Prophesee Role: Co-Founder and CEO Based in: Paris, France Education: MSc in physics, electronic and industrial engineering, Politecnico di Milano and Ecole Centrale de Lyon; MBA, INSEAD
The turning point in Luca Verre’s career – a challenging time he says, but a decision that has been incredibly fruitful – is when he quit his job at Schneider Electric and started Prophesee, the company he co-founded and where he is now CEO. Prophesee was launched in 2014. Its bio-inspired vision sensor and processing technology is based on 15 years of research at the Institut de la Vision – the French research centre for eye diseases – into how the retina works and modelling the retina in silicon, as well as efforts to develop a bio- inspired approach to computer vision. Under Verre’s stewardship, the company
has now raised a total of €127m, making it the EU’s most well-funded fabless semiconductor start-up, as of 2022, with investors that include mobile phone giant, Xiaomi, Sinovation Ventures, run by
"Our role as a pioneer is to keep innovating, stay ahead, make sure we connect dots at the software and system level and work with as many partners as possible"
artificial intelligence expert Kai-Fu Lee, and Intel Capital. Based in Paris, Verre holds an MSc
in physics, electronic and industrial engineering from Politecnico di Milano and Ecole Centrale de Lyon, and an MBA from the business school INSEAD, where he is Entrepreneur in Residence. The challenges Verre faced when starting
the company should be no barrier for others doing the same, he said. He recommends to those beginning a career in computer vision, or photonics in general, to go down the start-up route, rather than joining an established corporate firm, feeling that the experience of founding a start-up forces you to learn quickly and gives a great deal of exposure to new technology. His other advice for those embarking on a career in computer vision is to ‘go unconventional’ and to ‘play at the edge of innovation and, if you are lucky enough, define new edges’. Verre has certainly done that with
Prophesee. The company’s bio-inspired computer vision technology was first used to partially restore sight to a blind patient, the first reported case of this. Another milestone was the firm’s collaboration with Sony, resulting in an image sensor that combines Sony’s stacked CMOS fabrication methods with Prophesee’s sensing technologies. This work with the world’s largest manufacturer of image sensors was a big step for Prophesee to make its technology more accessible. Verre said there is a push at the moment in computer vision to bring sensing and image processing closer to the processor, to put as much intelligence as possible on or near the image sensor itself. One of the challenges he sees for computer vision firms, however, is getting access to advanced manufacturing technology for making small enough chips to be able to penetrate mass consumer devices. Prophesee announced a number of
partnerships and collaborations in 2022 to
bring its sensors to a wider audience. In an interview with Electro Optics’ sister title Imaging and Machine Vision Europe after winning the Vision Award at the 2021 Vision Stuttgart trade fair, Verre said: ‘Our role as a pioneer is to keep innovating, stay ahead, make sure we connect dots at the software and system level and work with as many partners as possible... so everyone in the ecosystem is able to build a full application.’ He praised Prophesee’s 100-strong
team, saying the group ‘is made up of talented professionals’. He also paid tribute to his brother, who he said is his ‘best friend and closest mentor; I wouldn’t have done what I’ve done without his support and advice’. Prophesee will be at CES in early January 2023; at Mobile World Congress in both Barcelona and Shanghai; at Image Sensors Europe, Vision China Shanghai, the TinyML summit, and more. You can find Verre at
linkedin.com/in/luca-verre-71b6a75.
2023 Photonics 100 65
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