Industrial Electronics

Freed from Intel, RealSense charts its own course

16 October 2025
RealSense’s D415 stereo depth camera is targeted at applications like 3D scanning and includes a rolling shutter on a depth sensor. Source: RealSense

Freed from Intel’s orbit, RealSense, an industrial computer vision vendor, is stepping into a new era as an independent company doubling down on AI-powered robotics, depth sensing, biometrics and new sectors for intelligent vision-enabled machines.

The spinoff happened in July of 2025, and simultaneously, the company raised $50 million in funding from Intel Capital and MediaTek Innovation Fund. The new investment will help the company expand its AI-powered computer vision, robotics and biometrics technologies.

With the company now an independent company, what can we expect moving forward?

New freedoms

No longer tied to Intel, RealSense will have autonomy to pursue its own goals in markets and technologies it believes to be the future and, maybe more importantly, where it sees traction like robotics, AI vision, depth sensing and biometrics.

Nadav Orbach, CEO of RealSense, said in a statement that the company will seek to build on 3D perception in robotics as well as potential in physical AI.

"Our independence allows us to move faster and innovate more boldly to adapt to rapidly changing market dynamics as we lead the charge in AI innovation and the coming robotics renaissance,” Orbach said.

Additionally, the new funding will allow RealSense to expand into adjacent and emerging markets where computer vision is becoming a necessity like autonomous mobile robotics and AI-powered access control and security solutions, RealSense said.

Future roadmap

RealSense said it will continue its existing roadmap of depth cameras that the company claims are embedded in 60% of the world’s autonomous mobile robots and humanoid robots. Recently, the company launched its D555 depth camera using its RealSense Vision system-on-chip V5 and includes Power over Ethernet (PoE).

RealSense said embedded vision with PoE technology along with edge AI capabilities will be part of the ongoing technology expansions in the future.

“Our mission is to enable the world to integrate robotics and AI in everyday life safely,” Orbach said. “This technology is not about replacing human creativity or decision-making — but about removing danger and drudgery from human work. Our systems are built to amplify human potential by offloading these types of tasks to machines equipped with intelligent, secure and reliable vision systems.”

In an interview with The Robot Report, Orbach said that while there were good aspects about being integrated with Intel, there were also real limitations.

Specifically:

  • Capital allocation
  • Marketing
  • Partnerships

The latter is particularly an area Orbach and RealSense will be exploring.

“Now, we can move faster, take more strategic risks, and form alliances that weren’t possible before,” Orbach said in the report.

As a result, RealSense is already forming alliances in different sectors like:

  • Agriculture
  • Retail automation
  • Aquaculture

The last sector is particularly interesting as RealSense recently just helped develop sensors that track fish populations underwater.

As AI-enabled computer vision improves, demand for spatial understanding is rising across numerous industries, Orbach said.

“There was some concern while we were still under Intel,” Orbach said to the Robot Report. “Customers wanted to know we weren’t going to get deprioritized. Now, they see a dedicated team with funding, a roadmap, and full control over its destiny.”

Nvidia deal

One of these partnerships came in August of 2025 when RealSense made a deal with Nvidia to integrate its AI depth cameras with Nvidia’s Jetson Thor and simulation platforms.

Why is this important? Nvidia’s Jetson Thor series is an edge computing platform designed for AI and robotics. RealSense’s depth cameras are also targeted in this area. The series is powered by Nvidia’s Blackwell GPU with an integrated Arm CPU and 128 GB of memory.

Given the marriage between robotics platforms and the need for these machines to have depth sensing, it is a natural fit for the companies to collaborate.

The companies said by integrating the RealSense D555 depth camera with the Jetson Thor computer platform it will help robotics developers to:

  • Shorten time to market
  • Discover new applications
  • Scale safely into production

The companies said native integration allows for perception performance to deliver sensor data and processing speed for next generation of humanoids and autonomous machines.

To contact the author of this article, email PBrown@globalspec.com


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