“The goal of our startup is to develop a new generation of high-performance inertial and pressure sensors to address the autonomous mobility market, ranging from defense to the automotive sectors, including industrial applications," Philippe told Caroline Coutier, Head of Laboratory -Electrical Characterization and Reliability, and Sophie Giroud, Deputy Head of Laboratory -Integration of Sensors and Actuators.
iNGage is a fabless developer of high-performance multi-axis inertial MEMS (micro-electro-mechanical systems) navigation sensors for autonomous systems. It has assembled three high performance gyroscopes and three high performance accelerometers onto one package, to create a component 10 times more sensitive than the capacitive MEMS sensors used in consumer and automotive devices today. The result? A sensor that can keep a vehicle's position accurate to about 50 cm after a minute of high‑speed travel without any GPS signal—a major upgrade from the tens of meter‑level drift that plagues today's inexpensive MEMS chips.
Starting Fast
Underlining its fast start, iNGage won the i-Lab 2024 contest sponsored by Bpifrance that highlights startups with significant potential for growth and impact with innovative technologies. iNGage was then selected in 2025 by PFA, the French automotive industry association, for its Automotive Lab startup studio to accelerate iNGage's introduction into the automotive supply chain.
iNGage's immediate next steps include the transfer of its M&NEMS technology to a foundry and development of complete prototypes integrating both the MEMS and the embedded electronics for initial customer evaluations. To accelerate its development, iNGage signed a joint-lab agreement with CEA-Leti.
Very High Accuracy Regardless of the Environment
In the company's target markets, vehicle or robotic geolocation systems don't always perform well and inertial navigation systems that could take over in these cases are too bulky and expensive.
“At CEA-Leti, we have developed multi-axis gyroscopes and accelerometers, as well as pressure sensors, that deliver 10x higher performance than those systems, while being more cost-effective and compact. These sensors make it possible to track the movement of an object with very high accuracy regardless of the environment, even where GPS systems are inoperative," explained Caroline.
30 Patents from 15 Years of R&D
Sophie pointed out that the core innovation of iNGage's M&NEMS technology is combining MEMS and microsensor with a NEMS, a piezoresistive nano-gauge.
“Thanks to this, we achieve a level of sensitivity and performance: 10x higher than existing capacitive detection–based systems. Today, the technology is protected by 30 patents resulting from 15 years of research and development in collaboration with our Italian partner, Politecnico di Milano," she explained.
“MEMS has been confined too long either in smartphones and cars with limited performance, or in aerospace-grade systems with high costs and large dies. The differentiation of our approach is combining three very high-performance gyros and three accelerometers on a single component for the first time—which supports European technological sovereignty," concluded Philippe.