Luminar Lands $100 Million Funding Boost To Ramp Up Lidar For Self-Driving Cars And Trucks

Luminar, a Silicon Valley-based maker of laser lidar sensors for self-driving vehicles, raised an additional $100 million and is marketing a new, affordable sensing and perception platform for automated passenger vehicles and commercial trucks to see their surroundings more accurately. 

The new funds, on top of earlier rounds the company hadn’t discussed publicly, boosts Luminar’s total capital raise to more than $250 million, CEO Austin Russell, the 24-year-old optics prodigy who founded the company three years ago, told Forbes. The new Iris platform combines Luminar’s latest-generation laser sensor and software that allows it to be installed in a vehicle as essentially a plug and play upgrade, he said. 

“Just over a year ago we launched the start of our supply relationships with test fleets, into development fleets, and that was a really important step,” Russell said. The new, smaller version of Luminar’s lidar is “now getting to an automotive grade package and form factor, along with a host of other requirements to put it into a real car. That's really what we're focused on now.”

The company plans to start delivering large volumes of sensors and software for vehicles hitting the road in the 2022 model year, or just about two years from now. The new sensor is a third the size of Luminar’s previous unit and can be seamlessly integrated into a vehicle’s front grille, roof or headlights, and the cost is far below earlier units. Iris packages will be priced at less than $1000 each for cars and trucks with high levels of self-driving capability, or so-called Level 4, the point at which a vehicle drives itself under most circumstances, Russell said. For carmakers who need a system to support advanced driver-assist capability, or Level 2 or 3 autonomy, a lower-priced Iris version costs less than $500. 

Lidar’s ability to rapidly generate 3D point cloud maps by bouncing a laser beam off a vehicle’s surroundings, working in conjunction with computer vision from high-tech cameras and radar, creates a comprehensive system for perceiving potential road hazards that, under the best circumstances, is superhuman. And with the exception of Tesla’s Elon Musk, who takes an outlier position on the technology, calling it a “fools errand” in April, virtually all companies developing self-driving systems are integrating it into their vehicles. 

With its added funding and aggressive timetable, Luminar is looking to win auto market sales away from Velodyne, the leading supplier of automotive lidar for more than a decade. Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo, the biggest and best-funded self-driving tech company, this year said it planned to sell its “laser bear honeycomb” short-range lidar to commercial customers, including those in non-automotive industries, for an undisclosed price. At least a dozen other lidar startups, including Innoviz and AEye, have their own plans for commercialization, and self-driving tech companies Cruise, owned by General Motors, and Aurora have acquired their lidar companies. 

Although Waymo and a handful of other companies operate robo-taxi pilot programs, that market will take some time to develop, Russell said. The more lucrative option in the next few years will be to supply technology for automated highway driving for both passenger cars and commercial trucks. 

“We're still all in on the robo-taxi and truck, where there's huge opportunities, but the one that interests us the most is the consumer vehicle side,” he said. “What we're looking at for these consumer applications is freeway autonomy, being able to get the driver out of the loop from exit to exit, starting out, then ultimately expanding out to suburban and urban environments.”

Luminar has announced supply and technology partnerships with companies including Toyota Research Institute, Volvo and Volkswagen and Audi. It has contracts with over 30 different partners, including 12 of the top 15 global automakers, and will “have a good wave of announcements coming up on the partner side,” Russell said, without elaborating.  

Separately, Luminar has also hired Daimler/Mercedes engineer Christoph Schroder to run its software team that supports the Iris platform. He previously led development of the German auto giant’s self-driving software and robo-taxi program at its Silicon Valley unit. Prior to that Schroder worked on automated driving tech for Bosch.  

Key investors in Luminar, including those joining its latest funding round, including G2VP, Moore Strategic Ventures, LLC, Nick Woodman, The Westly Group, 1517 Fund / Peter Thiel and Canvas Ventures. Other investors include Corning Inc, Cornes, and Volvo Cars Tech Fund.

Cornes and Corning are also supply chain partners as well as investors. In particular, Japan-based Cornes is supporting Luminar’s global expansion into Asia.