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Luminar Plans $3.4B Reverse-Merger IPO
- sdan 6y agoNot surprising imo. There are a lot of lidar companies that have come out and just like how self driving car teams/startups are almost required to be strapped with an OEM or big co (torc with mercedes, zoox with amazong for example), specialized lidar companies like Luminar and Ouster are pretty much on a straight path to a merger or acquisition.
- shinyFeature 6y ago> The CEO at Luminar, Russell, is 25. At age 17 he received a Thiel fellowship to build out Luminar. Does the Thiel fellowship mean he dropped out of College? I am not familiar with the founder but this feels odd and wrong to me given it's describing a (technical?)founder for a autonomous driving startup? Fully autonomous driving is a really hard technical problem and I believe you need a deep understanding of many advanced topics understand the boundaries of this space, yet alone innovate.
- zitterbewegung 6y agoYes, that was the point of the Thiel fellowship. It gives out grants if you apply for people who decide to drop out / not go to college and pursue something ambitious.
- apsec112 6y agoYes, Austin Russell dropped out of Stanford.
- vmception 6y agoHaha money printer go brrrrrr Honestly the only news is who is running that SPAC
- paxys 6y agoA four year undergrad degree would not get him that deep understanding.
- gibolt 6y agoLidar is almost always discussed in relation to self-driving vehicles. What are some other applications that stand to benefit significantly from a price reduction? Submersibles come to mind as a cost-prohibitive tech where this could help somewhat.
- duxup 6y agoYeah I'm wondering what the usage is here beyond self driving vehicles as well. Feels like there are a lot of sky high prices lidar companies and yet the failing of self driving cars so far isn't lidar....
- qppo 6y agoDrones?
- nradov 6y agoYes a lightweight, low-power lidar would be useful for collision avoidance when flying near terrain.
- redis_mlc 6y agoMany Polish government leaders were killed in 2010 in a crash in Russia when their pilots attempted to land in bad weather using a radar altimeter over rough terrain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smolensk_air_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smolensk_air_disaster (In Eastern Europe, pilots are pressured to continue VIP flights despite risks. So the PIC was likely told, "Fly and land, or be fired/arrested on the spot." There were "non-crew" reported in the cockpit, likely demanding a landing at the intended airport instead of an alternate. Some US regional airlines have also been caught firing pilots when maintenance problems are reported, but US civilian pilots (and dispatchers) are the final authority, and thankfully regional airlines are mostly gone since the FAA 1,500 hour rule.) So there are aviation use-cases for 3d radar/lidar navigation. Source: commercially-rated airplane pilot.
- abakker 6y agoAbsolutely, many drones do use Lidar. But, there probably aren't a million drones with high res Lidar in the world.
- jpm_sd 6y ago> All current Luminar holders will roll their equity stakes into the combined company , Luminar said. Does this mean nobody is actually selling any of their shares? Edit: Ah I got confused because this is called an "acquisition" but it's not really an acquisition, is it.
- apsec112 6y agoThey may sell later, but not at the time of IPO itself. Often, there's a lock-up period, where current stockholders are not allowed to sell to the public until a certain amount of time has passed.
- cortesoft 6y agoSPACs are kinda strange.. it is a way for a company to go public without directly selling any shares in an IPO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special-purpose_acquisition_company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special-purpose_acquisition_co... Matt Levine has written a lot about them, and why we are seeing quite a few right now
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- deepnotderp 6y agoAwesome stuff. I'm actually more excited to see what all the autonomous vehicle compute and sensor stuff will be used for in different domains. Just like cheap SoCs and MEMS from smartphones ended up being integral to the drone industry taking off.
- forgot_account 6y agoI see the applications/overlap with driving down the costs/size of multi-mode precision-guided munitions: guided missiles and drones that use a mix of laser, radar, and infrared sensing for all-weather accuracy. I'm not really a hardware guy but I'd love to prototype something Spike-sized with COTS sensors, then try to setup a factory in a developing nation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAVAIR_Spike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAVAIR_Spike
- cushychicken 6y agoDamn. Taking your company public in a multi-billion dollar SPAC deal at 25. I'd barely figured out how to pay rent on time by that age.
- threeseed 6y agoCan we remove Thiel Fellow from the title ? It's kind of annoying that startups are being defined by which investor did or didn't write a cheque. Founders deserve the credit for their startup's success not the VCs.
- anonAndOn 6y agoWhile it would be nice to be addressed as a Nobel laureate, I'd actually prefer the title of MacArthur Genius Grant winner. Both named for dead guys whose fortune paid for the award. Go figure.
- echelon 6y agoI think it's remarkable the CEO got an investment at age 17 and made it to an exit. Peter Thiel took a risk nobody else did.
- respondo2134 6y agothe "risk" he took is like me claiming credit for a homeless person escaping that terrible situation because I bought him a coffee.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- threeseed 6y agoTaking a risk implies that you are going to be personally impacted if everything falls through. Peter Thiel is worth $2.1b and almost all VCs are investing institutional money. So I think it's ridiculous to even mention them in the same breath as founders who are typically working 70+ hour weeks, dealing with immense stress and are poorly paid for an idea that is statistically likely to fail.
- aloukissas 6y ago+1 here. Editorializing is against posting guidelines: "[..] please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."
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- Animats 6y agoFor a company with no market? Yet another LIDAR company? Claiming to ship in 2022? The whole automotive LIDAR industry is in a slump, because nobody is buying in quantity.
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- pests 6y agoI really appreciate your constant LIDAR analysis in these posts. I always expect to see a comment from you when posts are about self driving or lidar advancements.
- Animats 6y agoI'm all in favor of LIDAR, but I don't see what makes this company worth $3.4 billion as a public company. The investors are putting in $570 million. Here's a list of the top players in automotive LIDAR: Delphi Automotive, Continental, ZF Friedrichshafen, Infineon Technologies, Velodyne Lidar, Texas Instruments Incorporated, First Sensor.[1] Not seeing Luminar on that list. Their 2022 product seems to be yet another rotating scanner. 120 degree horizontal field of view, 30 degree vertical. Possibly with some steering on the vertical axis to deal with hills. Nice renders of the packaging. Why is this worth $3.4 billion? There are lots of other cheap LIDAR real soon now companies. Quanergy. LeddarTech. InnoViz. Continental bought Advanced Scientific Concepts, which had expensive solid-state LIDAR working well. Continental put that product on hold because nobody wanted to order a few hundred thousand of them. Continental is an auto parts maker, and they do volume products only. They will sell you an expensive prototype if you want one. Delphi seems to be taking a similar position. [1] https://www.marketwatch.com/press-release/lidar-for-automotive-market-potential-growth-share-demand-and-analysis-of-key-players-research-forecasts-to-2026-2020-08-13 https://www.marketwatch.com/press-release/lidar-for-automoti...
- pests 6y agoI have definitely noticed a bias towards Continental in a lot of your posts. Do you really think they have a leg up on the industry?
- csours 6y agoI understand Reverse-Mergers generally, but I don't really understand how the money works. ?People? buy stock in an existing 'shell' company. The shell company buys the target company and immediately re-brands itself as the target company. I guess I don't understand valuation and dilution and who has ownership after the acquisition. It would seem that the founder would want to have a lot of the stock (more than 50%), but the owners of the shell company would also want to retain the ownership of their stock... Where does the stock come from for equity for the founders and employees?
- psanford 6y agoMatt Levine has been talking about SPACs a lot this year. Here's one of his articles that gives a good overview of how they work (esp. vs an IPO): https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2020-07-27/money-stuff-spacs-aren-t-cheaper-than-ipos-yet https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2020-07-27/money-...
- mrgordon 6y agoThis is a copycat move following Velodyne going public in a reverse merger with GRAF I think Velodyne will do better as they have a larger market share and the first mover advantage
- enahs-sf 6y agoCan someone here please explain the motivation behind all these SPAC transactions? Is it just to avoid the red tape and S-1 of IPO filing?
- ianai 6y agoIve read on HN SPAC mergers are good for “clearing out saints” ie firing people otherwise harder to terminate. It should in theory minimize volatility of the price after the merger as opposed to an IPO.
- lmm 6y agoAn SPAC lets the company negotiate a firm, fixed price, whereas an IPO is (semi) exposed to the market. Of course that comes at a cost - the company accepts a lower average price in return for reducing its risk. You can understand why that has become a bit more appealing in the last few months.
- supernova87a 6y agoHow do we tell whether autonomous cars are actually making progress? Is this a big bang final reveal, or is it possible to tell that every quarter, something on the way to full autonomy is developing? It seems that these spinoffs and acquisitions of Lidar companies, etc. all say they solve a piece of the puzzle, but it still seems no closer to a real system.
- 1123581321 6y agoAutonomous miles driven measures to a degree, but does not address concerns about hardware being too limited.
- person_of_color 6y agoCongrats, but is their LIDAR any good? https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/ifqzg7/comment/g2r8zhe https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/ifqzg7/com...