“This milestone is pivotal not just for us, but also for the larger automotive industry,” said Russell said in a statement.
Alec Gores will join the Luminar board of directors upon closing of the transaction. Russell will continue to serve as CEO and Tom Fennimore will continue to serve as CFO. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2020. Once the transaction closes, Luminar will maintain its name and will be listed on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol LAZR. The transaction will also include a balance of about $400 million cash that has been held by Gores Metropoulos. Luminar said it was able to raise $170 million in private investment in public equity, or PIPE, by institutional investors, including Alec Gores, Van Tuyl Companies, Peter Thiel, Volvo Cars Tech Fund, Crescent Cove, Moore Strategic Ventures, GoPro founder Nick Woodman and VectoIQ, with the majority of the major existing investors participating.
have gone public via a SPAC merger this spring and summer. Canoo, Fisker Inc., Lordstown Motors and Nikola Corp. Four electric vehicle startups have also skipped the traditional IPO path in recent months, opting instead to go public through a merger agreement with a SPAC, which are also known as blank check companies. In June, Velodyne Lidar struck a deal to merge with special purpose acquisition company Graf Industrial Corp., with a market value of $1.8 billion. Luminar is the latest startup - and second lidar company - to turn to SPACs this summer in lieu of a traditional IPO process. But the momentum from the Volvo deal along with interest within public markets led the company to take the SPAC route, Russell said. Luminar founder and CEO Austin Russell told TechCrunch that they wanted to go public at some point. The Luminar technology will be used to deploy an automated driving system for highways. The SPAC merger comes just three months after Luminar hit a critical milestone and announced that Volvo would start producing vehicles in 2022 equipped with its lidar and a perception stack. Gores Metropoulos, which is listed on the Nasdaq exchange, is a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, sponsored by an affiliate of The Gores Group, the global investment firm founded in the late 1980s by Alec Gores. Luminar teamed up with Volvo Cars and announced in January last year that a hands-free driving system called "Ride Pilot", which will allow the car to fully take over driving tasks in some limited situations, would be first released in California.Luminar, the lidar startup that burst onto the autonomous vehicle scene in April 2017 after operating for years in secrecy, is merging with special purpose acquisition company Gores Metropoulos Inc., with a post-deal market valuation of $3.4 billion. Palo Alto, California-based Luminar also said it plans to build a factory in Asia to support the multi-billion dollar deal. Luminar and Mercedes-Benz had announced a partnership in January last year.
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Luminar will supply the German carmaker with lidars, which use laser light pulses to measure the distance between the sensor and an object and are widely seen as essential to achieving full autonomous driving. Tech firms such as Alphabet Inc's Waymo and Aptiv-Hyundai Motor joint venture, Motional, are also looking to develop autonomous vehicles for commercial use. Self-driving sensor maker Luminar Technologies Inc announced an expanded partnership with Mercedes-Benz Group on Wednesday to enable fully automated driving for its next-generation vehicles.Īutomakers from Tesla Inc to General Motors are focusing on autonomous vehicles, but technological and regulatory hurdles remain.
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