Lidar: Laser sensing tech crucial for self-driving cars

Bloomberg

In the sixth grade, Austin Russell turned a Nintendo gaming handset into a cell phone. At 15, he built a holographic keyboard. By 17, he’d filed for a patent. Now at 22, he’s running a startup at the heart of Silicon Valley’s latest technology mania.
As founder and chief executive officer of Luminar Technologies Inc., Russell and his team are building lidar, a hyper-accurate laser sensing technology crucial for self-driving cars. Google parent Alphabet Inc. is suing Uber Technologies Inc. for allegedly stealing lidar designs, while startups Velodyne Lidar Inc. and Quanergy Systems Inc. have raised at least $150 million apiece from giants like Ford Motor Co., Baidu Inc., Daimler AG and Samsung Electronics Co.
Russell has raised a similar amount, according to people familiar with Luminar’s finances. The company, founded in 2012, had sought a valuation above $1 billion when it was raising money last year, one of the people said. It’s unclear who invested — Luminar is in “stealth” mode, meaning it hasn’t announced itself to the world yet. A spokeswoman declined to comment, as did Russell’s father Michael, a commercial real estate veteran who serves as chief financial officer. A message sent to Austin Russell through his LinkedIn profile was answered by his assistant, who declined to comment.
Peter Thiel awarded Russell a $100,000 Thiel Fellowship when he was 17, letting him quit Stanford University. The billionaire venture capitalist is a regular visitor to a sprawling Portola Valley ranch, 40 miles south of San Francisco, where Luminar tinkers and tests lidar systems while employees and guests crash on the couch, according to someone who has been there. Car companies, including BMW AG and General Motors Co., have also dropped by.
When it was occupied by a previous tenant, the five-acre space was featured in a TechCrunch video showing a pool, trampoline, room for more than 20 people to live, and space for the world’s largest organ. The property, with sweeping views of San Francisco Bay, was listed a few years ago for $22,000 a month.
That a relatively unknown college dropout of barely drinking age can raise millions of dollars shows the appetite for lidar. “It’s a gold rush and we’re selling pickaxes,” said Velodyne President Mike Jellen, who graduated college years before Russell was born. Several car companies want autonomous vehicles on the road by 2020 or 2021, which means they’re starting to order lots of lidar systems. Velodyne expects to ship 12,000 units this year, 80,000 in 2018 and 1.7 million by 2022.
Luminar’s rise also says a lot about Silicon Valley’s past and present. It’s still the place where prodigies can find generous backers for audacious plans. The ideas used to be mobile apps or web software. Now, it’s increasingly technology that interacts with the physical world — cars, robots, drones and software for automation. Russell is part of this new era.
In January, in the up-scale Nob Hill section of San Francisco, a gangling Russell attended a party for 1517 Fund, a VC firm partly backed by Thiel. Towering above the crowd, he lingered in the corner near the entrance, speaking in a booming voice, and avoiding eye contact with a reporter.
He was mostly immersed in his phone, which he showed occasionally to a small group gathered close to him, while more than 100 up-and-coming entrepreneurs and older mentor types chomped pizza. Some of Luminar’s money has been used to buy a small fleet of Tesla Model S electric cars, which it uses for testing, said one of the people who has visited. It’s also funding research and development to solve challenges that have plagued the nascent lidar market.
A top-of-the-range lidar from Velodyne sells for more than $50,000. It offers cheaper lidar, which generates lower-definition 3-D images, for about $8,000, while Quanergy has a product that sells for some $4,000. Autonomous cars often require two or more lidar sensors, so having a capable system can get expensive.
Russell is trying to develop a lidar priced significantly less than $1,000, according to people with knowledge of Luminar’s planning. Quanergy aims to have one that sells below $100 in three to four years.
Whereas radar uses radio waves to detect objects, lidar uses laser beams, helping it produce more accurate 3-D images. It’s an essential ingredient for autonomous driving because it generates a real-time image of passing and surrounding objects and helps a vehicle accurately locate itself. Satellite navigation systems are only accurate to within about 16 feet — not enough for a driverless future.
In a recent demonstration, the images generated by Luminar’s lidar system were higher-definition than those produced by competing equipment made by Velodyne or Quanergy, according to someone who saw the equipment first-hand, but was not allowed to discuss it publicly.