![]() ![]() Ouster's latest generation of 32-laser sensors start at $6,000. The resulting combination of strong performance and relatively low-cost has opened new markets for lidar sensors. Ouster's sensors are much simpler than Velodyne's classic design, which involved packaging together 16 to 128 individual lasers and 16 to 128 individual sensors. But inside, Ouster uses solid-state chip technology to pack all of its lasers-16 to 128 of them, depending on the product-on a single chip. Ouster makes spinning lidar that looks a lot like Velodyne's high-end sensors. Luminar hopes it will be an inspiration for other automakers. It's the first deal to put high-performance lidar into consumer vehicles. Back in May, Luminar announced a deal with Volvo to incorporate its lidars into vehicles beginning in 2022. Luminar's lidar is much more powerful than the sensor in those early Audis, and the company believes it can get the cost below $1,000 at scale. This is the market Luminar is gunning for. But it was the best lidar Audi could afford given the financial constraints of the consumer car business. The sensor was a primitive, with only four vertical "lines" of resolution. ![]() The pioneer here was a little-known company called Ibeo, which partnered with auto supplier Valeo to provide lidar sensors for the 2018 Audi A8. This market has traditionally been dominated by Velodyne, which has charged as much as $75,000 for a single sensor.Īt the opposite end of the spectrum are lidar sensors intended for mass-market automotive applications. Lidar sensors for this market generally need to stay under $1,000 to be viable. Because these companies are well-funded and they're only making a few prototype vehicles, they're willing to pay piles of money to get the most powerful sensors available. Self-driving companies buy these units for their prototype vehicles. The high end and the low endĪt the high end of the lidar market are powerful sensors that sell for tens of thousands of dollars each. In reality, the three companies are each pursuing different segments of the market. But saying that Ouster has become the industry leader would be too simplistic. The lidar startup Luminar hasn't revealed the number of customers, but it disclosed two other figures in August: the company has 50 commercial partners and expects to sell 0.1 thousand-aka roughly 100-lidar sensors in calendar year 2020.īy the metric of total customers, then, Ouster seems to be well ahead of two of its better-known rivals. Velodyne, which has been considered the industry leader for the last decade, revealed in July that it had 300 customers. That's interesting because we can compare it fairly directly to two other prominent lidar companies that have released data in recent months. That blog post also revealed a striking statistic: the company says it now has 800 customers. The latest lidar maker to release financial data is Ouster, which announced a $42 million fundraising round in a Tuesday blog post. That's starting to change. This summer, three leading lidar makers have done major fundraising rounds that included releasing public data on their financial performance. Dozens of lidar startups have touted their impressive technology, but until recently it wasn't clear who, if anyone, was actually gaining traction with customers. For years, the lidar business has had a lot of hype but not a lot of hard numbers. ![]()
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