Blaize & LeiShen Partner to Fuse Lidar and AI for Safer Autonomous Driving & Smart City Solutions

Blaize has signed a strategic partnership with LeiShen, a leading lidar supplier, to combine lidar and AI capabilities for autonomous operations in China’s automotive and smart‑city sectors.

Together, they are developing a sensor‑fusion platform that merges LeiShen’s lidar hardware with Blaize’s Pathfinder P1600 System‑on‑Module (SOM), an embedded AI accelerator.

The collaboration will drive autonomous‑driving and smart‑city initiatives powered by lidar. The Pathfinder P1600, embedded in LeiShen’s high‑grade automotive lidar, accelerates point‑cloud processing and associated algorithms. Its proprietary sensor‑fusion algorithm delivers target data directly, enabling robust fusion solutions for both domains.

“LeiShen is committed to making driving safer, robots smarter and life better, with advanced, stable and reliable lidar sensing technology,” said Hu Xiaobo, founder and CEO of LeiShen Intelligence. “The cooperation with Blaize will not only help customers make better use of Lidar, but also enable more safe, reliable and powerful intelligent sensing applications for autonomous driving and smart city projects.”

The CEO and co‑founder of Blaize, Dinakar Munagala, added, “LeiShen’s innovative intelligent lidar sensing technology and Blaize products built on our graph streaming processor (GSP) architecture are an ideal combination to enable safer and more reliable autonomous operation. We look forward to working with LeiShen as we serve the market providing better optimized, efficient and economic solutions for electrification, vehicle safety, infotainment, and other intelligence applications.”

The Blaize GSP architecture allows multiple neural networks and entire workflows to run concurrently on a single system, uniquely enabling end‑to‑end applications that integrate non‑neural functions—such as image signal processing and lidar—with neural‑network logic.

LeiShen boasts strong R&D capabilities, uniquely mastering all four ranging principles—time‑of‑flight, triangulation, phase, and FMCW—and independently developing 1550 nm fiber lasers and core components. In April 2021, it launched a hybrid solid‑state lidar that received the first vehicle‑regulation certification in China up to CH32, followed by the high‑profile 128‑wire vehicle‑grade hybrid solid‑state lidar, CH128x1.