Since launching with my co-founder Cibby Pulikkaseril in 2016, we have watched Baraja grow from an idea of how to reinvent LiDAR to a global business en route to developing the industry’s first endgame LiDAR sensor system that will enable true automotive autonomy.

Now, with so many core milestones behind us, we feel that Baraja has reached a critical transition point in its journey. We are no longer a small team of passionate inventors who believe our technology could work. We are a large, global team of innovators, experts and industry partners who have witnessed exactly how our unique approach to LiDAR has revolutionized the industry, and want to be a part of the technology that will enable a truly autonomous future.

Our vision has evolved from the hard work required for developing something completely new-to-world into proven technology with a clear path to automotive integration. To represent that evolution, we have chosen to redesign our image to tell the story of where we’re at today and what’s to come tomorrow.

It’s not about us; it’s about you

In the early days of Baraja, our small team of engineers spent two years working obsessively to help us develop the best LiDAR in the world. Every day was filled with conversations about accurate and fast wavelength tuning for the laser, prism-like optics and how to create a LiDAR platform that solved the issues of L4 autonomy.

When we finally developed our core technology, we were proud of our ability to completely reinvent every single function of the LiDAR system—from our patented steering mechanism Spectrum-Scan™ LiDAR to our unique ranging method RMCW—so that we could solve the issues of automotive LiDAR without any trade-offs. To celebrate that monumental milestone, we developed our first logomark rooted in a sinewave as representation of Spectrum-Scan™ technology. This logo was very much about us. It paid homage to the two years of grit, determination and hard work from our team, and was a celebration and reminder of what we were able to create. At the heart of it though we’ve always been clear that what we do is to enable our customers and partners, and this was encapsulated in our motto: we move light, so you can move mountains.

Fast-forward three years and we want to reiterate that it’s about you. It’s about our partners in automotive and manufacturing, our expanding team of talent in our multi-national offices and our growing market reach across the globe. So, while the original Baraja logo will continue to represent a very special part of our story, our new brand will represent what we bring to the table in terms of technology, growth and influence, and what matters most to the people who matter most: you.

The story behind the logo

When coming up with the new logo, we wanted to create a visual representation of what our clients look for in LiDAR—and that’s the best pointcloud possible. Automotive clients need high-resolution and a long-range pointcloud they can trust—that’s exactly what Baraja represents.

We are pointcloud experts, so when redesigning our logo, we took inspiration from our very own pointcloud. We derived our color palette from the parula spectrum that our pointcloud is shown in, and the dot formation represents points in our pointcloud, mimicking our unique scan pattern. One of the most important elements of the logo, however, isn’t what you see. Rather, it’s the space between it.

The dot pattern represents points, and the space between those dots represents our distinct approach to scanning. Our vertical scan technology enables us to create a unique diamond grid scan pattern that we term interleaving. The staggered diamond grid pattern improves spatial sampling, thus providing a more accurate image of the environment.

No other LiDAR system on the market uses this approach to scanning, leaving holes of information in their pointcloud. Because of interleaving, we can produce a full picture of our surroundings down to the tiniest of details. It also allows us to increase spatial sampling without the need for more points per second. Without this approach, we simply wouldn’t have the pointcloud resolution that we are known for.

How we got here

The last five years at Baraja have been busy ones. Our company has rapidly grown and matured, and we have successfully grown from a stealth start-up to a global operation delivering ground-breaking solutions to innovative clients worldwide.

Since launching, we have more than tripled our team. We now have 150 employees working with us in offices across Australia, the US, Europe and China—and that number continues to grow. We have also employed a full executive team, hiring some of the industry’s top talent to help us achieve our vision and complete our goals with laser focus and expertise.

We have also moved from technology development to manufacturing scale up. Through years of rigorous testing, both in-house and with customers and partners in the field, we’ve validated our core technology and made methodological improvements to our original design. This time allowed us to shape the very best LiDAR sensor system now successfully deployed in volume off-road applications and being fine-tuned with our partner Veoneer for on-road volume production.

Now that we have proven technology capable of providing the level of range, resolution, reliability and data credibility that autonomous vehicles require, we are focused on manufacturing that technology and sizing our LiDAR down to a single chip. And because we have always had automotive in mind since day one, we have a very clear and straightforward path on how to get there.

I am personally very proud of the growth and success of Baraja over the past several years, and as we move forward with our new look and our new customer-focused mindset, I look forward to watching our Spectrum-Scan™ LiDAR system help you achieve innovation and success as well.