Driverless car start-up Baraja worth $145m after latest fundraising

That round was joined by the Chinese arm of Silicon Valley heavyweight Sequoia Capital, Blackbird Ventures (backer of another Australian-founded driverless car hopeful in Zoox), and CSIRO, which became an investor as well as landlord through its Main Sequence Ventures fund.

The most recent raise has valued the stakes of founders Federico Collarte, 37, and Cibby Pulikkaseril, 40, at over $25 million each. This is around the cut-off of 2018's Young Rich List, however Mr Pulikkaseril turns 41 in July and will be ineligible for the list of Australia's wealthiest people aged 40 and under by the time it appears in AFR Magazine on October 25.

Baraja's valuation was a "sign of progress" but much work remained to be done, according to Mr Collarte.

"Our product today is for the after-market, something you place on top of a car," he said.

"Generations two and three will be embedded in new driverless vehicles, they'll be cheaper and even more reliable."

In December Baraja received ISO 9001 certification for the quality of manufacturing in its system, trademarked as Spectrum-Scan, which uses lasers capable of changing colour in the infrared spectrum, as opposed to the visible spectrum.

So when white light is refracted through the prisms inside the four sensors mounted on vehicles in Baraja's system, the unique angle at which they exit will communicate unique shades via fibre-optic connection to the processor located inside the vehicle.

The founders claim this produces a highly accurate picture of the distance and reflectivity of surrounding objects, with the laser able to be automatically "tuned" to change resolution and focal points as required.

Baraja's product also solved the problem of signal disruption when several driverless cars were near each other firing out laser in all directions, Mr Collarte claimed.

"Most LiDAR operates using a single wavelength of light, and when two such systems are facing each other, they can be rendered 'blind' – meaning they will disengage and hand over control to a human – or even see ghost objects and brake when they don't need to," he said.

"Because we're constantly varying the wavelength of light, to get interference an incoming light beam would have to simultaneously match the angle, colour and timing of ours, which would be extremely difficult."

Baraja made $130,051 of sales revenue in 2017-18 and a further $1.8 million in research and development grants, according to accounts lodged with the corporate regulator.

Sales revenue had increased considerably in 2018-19, according to Mr Collarte, while conceding that industry hype of commercial autonomous fleets hitting roads by 2019 were probably optimistic.

"But we're a part of solving the problems that have delayed the ramp-up," he said.

"If we get this right, the value we've created will eventually be seen by everybody that gets into an autonomous vehicle, and of course Baraja's own valuation will be huge."