Nouvel joins at a pivotal stage as the company transitions from development to large-scale commercialisation of its silicon photonics based sensing technology, enabling machines to autonomously perceive and understand their environments with millimeter precision demanded by the emerging era of Physical AI.

A proven leader in Lidar innovation

Nouvel has nearly a decade of Lidar and automotive sensing experience from Valeo, where he led multiple initiatives from Business Development through R&D and production. Having witnessed the scalability challenges of traditional Lidar systems firsthand, he now brings his deep technical insight and operational expertise to a company poised to redefine active sensing.

“Lidar enabled the first wave of autonomous vehicles,” said Clément Nouvel, Chief Executive Officer of Voyant. “Voyant’s on-chip FMCW technology will enable the second wave - autonomous everything. But the challenges are multiple, and purpose-built solutions are required. The era of Physical AI demands sensing that’s not just accurate, but scalable, affordable, and ready to deploy across thousands of applications in diverse operating environments. At Voyant, we are building the core technology that will enable these applications.”

Nouvel’s leadership marks a new chapter for Voyant, signaling the company’s shift from an R&D-driven startup to a deployment-ready technology platform designed for real-world adoption across multiple industries. While early Lidar innovation focused on vehicles, Voyant’s mission is broader: to bring spatial awareness to all machines that interact with the physical world. Applications range from factory and warehouse robots to drones, smart infrastructure, and wearable AR devices.

As the boundaries between the digital and physical worlds blur, Voyant’s on-chip Lidar enables machines not just to see, but to understand motion, depth, and context, which is foundational for the next generation of intelligent systems.

“Intelligence without high-quality spatial data is incomplete,” said Nouvel. “The limiting factor isn’t AI itself; it’s what AI can make sense of. We need systems that can leverage the reasoning power of AI by providing them with more data for depth, velocity, and precision.”