By: Rusty Brooks
Luminar founder Austin Russell at 26 years old, has become one of the youngest self-made billionaires after his lidar company debuted as an IPO last week
Luminar’s share price surged nearly 28 percent on its Thursday debut to close at $22.98, giving the company a market value of about $7.8 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Eight years ago, Russell co-founded Luminar Technologies, a Silicon Valley startup trying to steer the rapidly expanding self-driving car industry in a new direction. Luminar kept its work closely guarded until 2017, when the startup revealed the first details about a product Russell debuted as a far more powerful form of “lidar,” a key sensing technology used in autonomous vehicles designed by Google, Uber and major automakers, AP reported
Luminar has emerged as one of the leading companies in the fast-growing lidar industry. Carmakers are expected to begin offering lidar as an advanced option for their vehicles in the next few years to enable better driver-assistance technology. Right now, lidar companies are vying to win contracts to supply these sensors, ars technica reported.
Lidar is a method for measuring distances (ranging) by illuminating the target with laser light and measuring the reflection with a sensor. Differences in laser return times and wavelengths can then be used to make digital 3-D representations of the target. It has terrestrial, airborne, and mobile applications.
Lidar is commonly used to make high-resolution maps, with applications in surveying, geodesy, geomatics, archaeology, geography, geology, geomorphology, seismology, forestry, atmospheric physics, laser guidance, airborne laser swath mapping (ALSM), and laser altimetry. The technology is also used in control and navigation for some autonomous cars., futurism.com reported.
Luminar has emerged as one of the leading companies in the fast-growing lidar industry.
Luminar went public via a merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC)—a financial vehicle that helps startups bypass some of the complexity and paperwork of a traditional IPO. Instead of offering its shares directly to the public, Luminar merged with a company called Gores Metropoulos that had previously been created for the purpose of finding a startup to take public.
While industry leader Velodyne has traditionally made 360-degree spinning units designed to sit on a vehicle roof, Luminar’s sensors are fixed in place and cover a 120-degree horizontal field of view in front of a vehicle, ars technical reported.
Long range is viewed as essential for advanced self-driving systems, and Luminar claims its lidar has an industry-leading range of 250 meters
