![]() The Autonomy Solutions segment includes the designing, manufacturing, and marketing of lidar sensors catering mainly to the OEMs in the automobile, commercial vehicle, robo-taxi and adjacent industries. It operates through the Autonomy Solutions and Advanced Technologies and Services segments. ![]() is an autonomous vehicle sensor and Lidar technology company, which engages in the design, building, and marketing of long-range lidar products that address the requirements of global automotive OEMs and technology companies for autonomous driving. This article has been updated to reflect the financial terms of the deal.Luminar Technologies, Inc. Luminar’s share price is down about 2% in after-hours. “In addition to helping extend Luminar’s automotive industry leadership, this provides us greater opportunity to simultaneously support and scale customers in other industry verticals.”įreedom Photonics’s staff will also be acquired by Luminar, and its executive team will continue to lead the business upon close of the transaction. “Going all-in with Luminar is the perfect opportunity for Freedom Photonics, providing us an accelerated path to at-scale commercialization of our world-class laser chip technologies,” said Milan Mashanovitch, CEO at Freedom Photonics, in a statement. ![]() And last year’s acquisition of Optogration and its receiver chips also unlocked performance and economics for the company, according to Eichenholz. Its 2017 acquisition of Black Forest Engineers, a custom signal processing chipmaker, enabled Luminar to bring down the cost of receivers from tens of thousands of dollars to $3. Luminar has already acquired the tech and teams for the other two legs of the stool. This isn’t because lasers are especially hard to come by, but “lasers with the right performance parameters to unlock autonomy and have proactive safety that can be met in an automotive qualified environment is a lot harder,” said Eichenholz. The deal, which follows a multi-year collaboration between the two companies, not only improves the quality of Luminar’s lidar, but it also allows Luminar to control more of the costs in the supply chain. In order to get the point density and resolution needed to allow the AV system to determine whether it sees a tire or a person 300 meters ahead on the road, a high-powered laser pulse and high-quality beams are critical, two components that Freedom Photonics excel at, according to Eichenholz. Whether on city streets or highways, a major problem autonomous vehicle systems face is the ability to see and recognize objects at far distances. “The deal is signed and expected to close in the second quarter, and it really brings Freedom Photonics’s high-powered laser and their related photonic integrated circuit technologies to optimize the performance, as well as advance our cost roadmap, of our future sensors,” Jason Eichenholz, Luminar’s co-founder and chief technology officer, told TechCrunch. ![]() The buy is Luminar’s latest to vertically integrate core lidar components to bring more accurate, lower-cost products to market. The all-stock transaction involves Luminar transferring 3 million shares of its common stock, or about $42.3 million at today’s share price, to Freedom Photonics’s employees per a regulatory filing. Luminar, a company that builds vision-based lidar and machine perception technologies for autonomous vehicles, is acquiring high-performance laser manufacturer Freedom Photonics on Monday.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |