Metalenz acquires PxE Imaging to add color-and-depth sensing to its AI vision platform

Metalenz has acquired Israel-based PxE Imaging, adding technology designed to capture color and depth together rather than assemble them from separate cameras. The deal, announced November 11, 2026, extends Metalenz’s sensing platform into visible imaging. Its pitch is to give AI richer visual information while leaving less work for software downstream.

The companies did not disclose transaction terms. PxE brings its Holocoder technology and team to a business that already captures information about materials and surfaces through polarization—the property of light used by Metalenz’s existing PolarEyes platform to help distinguish materials.

Recovering light before software gets involved

The technical problem starts with how cameras make color images. Metalenz says image sensors in billions of cameras use a Bayer filter, which allows a color image to be reconstructed but absorbs 60% of incoming light. That makes the filter itself a target for improving how much light reaches the sensor.

PxE’s approach replaces that filter. According to Metalenz, Holocoder sorts light without absorbing it, delivering 2.5 times as much light to a standard image sensor. The company says that improves performance across dark and bright scenes; the figure is a company-supplied claim, not an independently verified result.

Holocoder was invented by PxE co-founder and CEO Yoav Berlatzky. Its structure is patterned directly onto the sensor, using the wave nature of light to decode information including wavelength and depth. Metalenz describes this sensor-level construction as similar to the approach used in its own Polar ID system.

One camera, already-aligned information

The acquisition’s significance goes beyond brighter pictures. PxE says Holocoder captures color and depth simultaneously with a single camera. The same hardware layer records spatial geometry alongside the visible image, so the two types of information are aligned at capture rather than having to be matched afterward.

Metalenz says that avoids additional modules and computationally expensive sensor fusion—the work of combining information from different sensors. Its stated benefit is less downstream processing, allowing AI to run more efficiently at the edge, meaning on the device itself.

That is the acquisition rationale articulated by Metalenz co-founder and CEO Rob Devlin: collect more useful information in hardware, then carry it through the software stack to AI decisions. He argues that controlling the hardware that supplies those inputs can distinguish the models built around them.

Owning hardware that brings new information to sensors is the real moat for differentiated AI models.

Rob Devlin, co-founder and CEO of Metalenz

A manufacturing route to everyday devices

Metalenz brings an existing manufacturing operation to that ambition. Spun out of Harvard University in 2016, it integrates optical technology directly onto image sensors using processes compatible with semiconductor foundries. The company says more than 300 million of its metasurface optics have shipped in consumer devices.

That shipment figure describes Metalenz’s established optics business, not deployment of the newly acquired Holocoder technology. Berlatzky frames the combination as a route to commercialization: PxE supplies the sensing approach, while Metalenz supplies the manufacturing platform and commercial reach needed to bring it to everyday devices.

The intended applications span consumer electronics, automotive systems, drones and robotics. Metalenz says the combination adds color and depth to its existing material and surface information in a form designed for mass-market devices. The announcement did not give a timetable for bringing Holocoder to consumer devices.