Luminar Goes Public Through Reverse Merger at $3.4B Valuation

BusinessWire: After Velodyne, another LiDAR company, Luminar, goes public on NASDAQ by reverse merging with Gores Metropoulos. The transaction includes $400M of cash from Gores Metropoulos and an immediate $170M financing into Luminar. The combined company will have an implied pro forma enterprise value of approximately $2.9 billion and an equity value of approximately $3.4 billion at closing.

"Founded in 2012 by CEO Austin Russell, Luminar is the leading autonomous vehicle and lidar technology company for consumer cars and trucking. Luminar is partnered with 7 of the top 10 global automakers and is set to power the introduction of highway self-driving and next-generation safety systems. Over 350 people strong, Luminar has built a new type of lidar from the chip-level up with breakthroughs across all core components.

Luminar today also announced it has scaled its software team with the addition of 16 former members of Samsung’s Munich-based DRVLINE platform team that were previously responsible for delivering ADAS functionality to its mobility customers. Luminar will leverage this team to bring a full-stack lidar-based ADAS and Level 4 highway autonomy product offering to market."

Luminar's presentation talks about the company's achievements:

Like in case of Velodyne, becoming a public company gives us a rare opportunity to look into the LiDAR company economics: