Luminar builds lidar hardware and a perception stack aimed at enabling highway autonomy for passenger vehicles and trucks. Its technology is intended for series production and cost-effective deployment, with founder Austin Russell emphasizing highway use cases as the shortest path to commercialization. The company has announced OEM partnerships, including a deal with Volvo to equip vehicles beginning in 2022 and collaboration with Torc Robotics on autonomous trucking. Luminar’s sensors are being integrated into plans for Freightliner Cascadia trucks as part of Daimler’s push toward Level 4 on-highway automation. Financially, Luminar is going public via a merger with Gores Metropoulos Inc., having raised $170 million as part of that transaction. Daimler Trucks’ division also made an undisclosed strategic investment in the company. Luminar develops compact lidar hardware and a perception software platform for production vehicles. It unveiled Iris, a new lidar unit about a third the size of its prior test unit and designed for easier integration into cars and trucks. Iris is priced under $1,000 per unit for serious autonomy use and about $500 for a more limited ADAS version. The company says Iris is slated to launch commercially on production vehicles beginning in 2022 and is negotiating more than $1 billion in contracts. Luminar has been building a perception team of roughly 60 people split between Palo Alto and Orlando and recently hired Christoph Schroder as VP of Software. The company has raised over $250 million to date, supporting its push from lab prototypes toward series production. Luminar develops lidar hardware and a perception development platform that analyzes high-resolution 3D point-cloud data for autonomous vehicles. The platform performs detection and labeling of objects, taking on some perception duties rather than leaving that entirely to vehicle systems, and passes high-confidence information to the vehicle's decision-making software. Founder and CEO Austin Russell emphasized leveraging richer 3D data rather than applying 2D algorithms, and said the platform itself does not make driving decisions. Volvo Cars' Tech Fund made an undisclosed investment and is the first customer for the perception platform; Volvo constrained the system’s initial use to highway driving. Luminar has partnerships with four major OEMs, including the Toyota Research Institute and Volvo, with two other partners undisclosed, and the company intends to offer the standardized platform only to partners. No financial terms beyond Volvo's undisclosed investment were disclosed in the article.

Total raised

$100M

Funding rounds

3

Latest round

Equity

Latest activity

Jul 2019