Luminar Technologies Inc., a heavily funded startup developing lidar sensors for autonomous vehicles, today said that it will hit the stock exchange through a $3.4 billion reverse merger with a so-called special purpose acquisition company.

A special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, is an entity created for the sole purpose of buying another firm and taking it public. It’s an unusual way to list on the stock market that bypasses the traditional initial public offering process, but it has become quite popular in recent quarters.  

The entity acquiring Luminar, Gores Metropoulos Inc., is backed by private equity firm Gores Group LLC and billionaire investor Dean Metropoulos. After the deal is done, Luminar will become listed on the Nasdaq stock market with an initial equity value of $3.4 billion. The startup will raise $400 million from Gores Metropoulos as part of the transaction, plus a additional $170 million from a group of investors that includes Peter Thiel, Volvo AB and a half-dozen others.

Luminar said it will use the proceeds to speed up the commercialization of its lidar technology. Luminar sells lidar sensors for autonomous cars and trucks that enable vehicles to see their surroundings by emitting pulses of laser light into the environment. Those pulses bounce off nearby objects back into the sensor, which turns the returning photons into pixels in a map.

Many other startups are also developing lidar sensors, but Luminar has managed to stand out from the pack. It secured about $250 million in venture funding prior to today’s listing announcement and recently landed a high-profile deal with Volvo to supply sensors for the automaker’s upcoming autonomous cars.

Luminar has set itself apart by venturing off the beaten track with its sensor design. Most other suppliers’ lidar units use laser light with a 904-nanometer wavelength that can be harmful to the eye, which requires them to operate at limited power levels. Luminar says that its sensor doesn’t have this power level constraint because it employs laser pulses with a 1,550-nanometer wavelength, to which the human eye is far less sensitive. 

Luminar has developed several new technologies to let its sensor work with 1,550-nanometer light. These include a specialized receiver for picking up reflected laser pulses from the environment that isn’t based on standard silicon components, but rather an expensive alloy known as indium-gallium arsenide. 

The startup says that its sensor can spot cars from 250 meters away and lane markings from a distance of 150 meters. Alongside its core sensor hardware, Luminar also plans to offer software to help automakers with the complicated task of turning raw lidar measurements into a usable map.

Luminar Chief Executive Officer Austin Russell and Chief Financial Officer Tom Fennimore will stay at the helm after the listing. The combined company that will emerge from the startup’s merger with Gores Metropoulos will keep the Luminar brand, trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “LAZR.”

Luminar is the latest in a growing list of companies that have opted to go public through a merger with a SPAC instead of a traditional IPO. Among the other firms that have taken this route is Velodyne Lidar Inc., Luminar’s top competitor. One of the main benefits of a SPAC merger over a traditional public offering is that it’s considerably faster, which is boon for startups seeking a large amount of capital to scale up their operations quickly. 

Photo: Luminar Technologies