Prophesee raises €20 million and launches Mantara, the first integrated drone detection system based on event-based vision and AI

• Six months after the arrival of Jean Ferré as new CEO, Prophesee announces a €20 million funding round to support its new full-stack dual-use civil and defence strategy.
• Mantara is the first integrated drone detection system natively designed as event-based, from chip to AI processing, fully embedded.
• Its software backbone, Hearth, becomes the first software platform dedicated to event-based sensors, integrating proprietary AI models and enabling continuous updates in the field.

Paris, 15 June 2026 — As Eurosatory and Vivatech open their doors this week in Paris, Prophesee, inventor and global leader in event-based perception, announces the launch of Mantara: the first integrated system natively designed for event-based drone detection and tracking. Mantara will rely on the new software platform, Hearth, featuring integrated AI processing.

Field-tested in June 2026, Mantara is built on Hearth, the software platform that succeeds OpenEB and the Metavision SDK. These announcements coincide with a €20 million capital increase led by French fund Critical Path Ventures and supported by existing shareholders. Prophesee is now predominantly owned by French shareholders.

Mantara is a camera whose performance is based on sensors that do not capture images but movements — events. Each pixel reacts independently within microseconds as soon as motion occurs. Fast and erratic targets, which fade or disappear between frames in conventional cameras, remain fully visible and trackable for Mantara, even in low light, backlighting, or cluttered backgrounds. Low latency is at the core of its performance: by the time a conventional system captures, transfers, and processes a single image, Mantara has already detected and characterised a drone and triggered tracking or response.

This approach is based on a biomimetic design inspired by the human eye. The human visual system does not record everything: the eye captures sparse and essential signals, and the brain reconstructs and interprets the scene. If Mantara is the eye, Hearth is the brain.

“In counter-drone missions, the right camera is not the one that sees everything. It is the one that delivers exactly what is needed to read the scene instantly, maintain awareness, and make the right decision. It is also the one that adapts to constantly evolving threats.” said Jean Ferré, CEO of Prophesee.

Hearth integrates cybersecurity requirements, GDPR compliance, and AI governance standards. Hearth facilitates sensor fusion and will enable backward compatibility across different generations of Prophesee sensors. Applications developed with Metavision and OpenEB will also be able to migrate easily to Hearth.

Recent conflicts have placed drones at the centre of modern warfare, and the threat is rapidly extending beyond the battlefield: airports, power plants, critical infrastructure, and public events. Drones fly low, change direction quickly, and increasingly exhibit an almost zero signature: minimal electromagnetic emissions, little noise, and low heat. They arrive faster and in larger numbers, with coordinated swarms capable of overwhelming defences designed to track a single target at a time.

Mantara emits nothing. It cannot be detected or jammed. But it learns continuously: Hearth delivers regular updates that allow each unit deployed in the field to adapt to evolving threats. The war in Ukraine has shown that tactics evolve faster than traditional development cycles.

Civil and military missions
Mantara addresses both civilian and military needs. Airports, stadiums, strategic sites — energy or industrial — prisons, and ports can integrate it into existing security systems to ensure continuous and automated airspace monitoring. Governments and defence actors use the same system for force protection and counter-UAS missions.

Civilian operators also benefit from a major privacy advantage: motion sensors detect events, not images. Mantara can track moving objects without ever producing images that would allow individuals to be identified. This is a decisive advantage for deployment over public spaces, in compliance with GDPR.

Hearth becomes the reference platform for the event-based ecosystem
Mantara is part of a broader strategy covering Prophesee’s entire offering.
“The next decade of event-based vision is built on three levels at once: intelligence in the sensor, complete systems like Mantara, and Hearth for everyone developing on top of our technology. OpenEB and the SDK got us here, but Hearth is now the platform of the future,” explains Thibaut Willeman, VP Product.

Hearth will provide the event-based detection ecosystem with a reference environment for developing scalable, industrial-grade modules and applications.

Hearth will support sensor updates and backward compatibility, along with many capabilities previously inaccessible to developers and companies integrating Prophesee’s patented technology.

As part of this transition, Prophesee announces the end of life of OpenEB, its open-source framework, as well as the standalone Metavision SDK. The path forward for the developer community is through Hearth rather than standalone tools. Migration to Hearth will be supported by Prophesee.

Prophesee’s partners and clients have developed numerous applications ranging from eye tracking to ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems), ultra-fast mobile phone cameras, ping-pong playing robots, industrial applications, and drone or satellite tracking and targeting solutions. Event-based vision is reaching an inflection point: the market is accelerating and demanding mature, secure, and robust solutions. With around one hundred patents and several sensor generations, Prophesee has industrialised event-based vision as a technology and now aims to structure the application ecosystem by widely deploying the Hearth software platform.

Built with a European industrial partner network
Mantara benefits from Prophesee’s partnership with IDS Imaging Development Systems GmbH, a major industrial camera manufacturer. Following the commercial success of the IDS uEye EVS camera range based on Prophesee sensors, the two companies expanded their partnership in March 2026, with an agreement signed at the Embedded World trade fair in Nuremberg to develop next-generation industrial vision systems.

Prophesee and Exosens have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), paving the way for a long-term partnership aimed at extending biomimetic technology beyond the visible spectrum by combining Prophesee’s event-based vision with Exosens’ detection and imaging technologies.

Jérôme Cerisier, CEO of Exosens: “Exosens technology reveals what is invisible to the human eye by operating at night and across the full light spectrum, in all environments. Prophesee adds a unique dimension: speed, with the temporal resolution required by today’s threat detection and counter-drone needs. By combining our technologies, we will offer our clients the technical leadership and ITAR-free innovation required for high-intensity warfare.”

A €20 million fundraising round to anchor Prophesee in France
Prophesee announces a €20 million capital increase led by Critical Path Ventures, a new investor in the company. The team has been strengthened with talent from Google, Microsoft, BCG, Thales, as well as from drone, robotics, quantum companies, and armed forces backgrounds. The funds raised will support the commercial scale-up of Mantara, the development of embedded sensor intelligence, and the launch of Hearth.

Nicolas Foessel, Managing Director of Critical Path Ventures: “Our investment in Prophesee is based on a clear conviction: transforming a unique technology into fully integrated systems operational in the field. We are pleased to see Mantara already commercialised and validated in real-world environments. Prophesee is the ideal player to strengthen Europe’s technological sovereignty in this strategic domain.”

About Prophesee
Prophesee designs vision and perception technologies for critical decision-making. Its event-based cameras, sensors, and software, developed over more than ten years, are deployed across industry, security, and defence. Prophesee is based in Paris, with offices in Grenoble, Shanghai, and Tokyo.

About Critical Path Ventures
Since 2022, Critical Path Ventures has been investing in innovative scientific research projects, financially supporting startups founded by researcher-entrepreneurs from the seed stage. Often in co-investment, Critical Path Ventures selects on average six projects per year, mainly in physics, medicine, biotechnology, and robotics, promoting industrial development and job creation in France.