With the drives from autonomous car development, LiDAR technology has been under the spotlight. Startups which focus on the technology have also gained attentions from the related industry and continued to unveil their development and updates about the technology.

Luminar, a LiDAR startup that aim to increase the accessibility of the technology, has recruited Brent Schwarz, a veteran in the LiDAR sensor industry who has experiences at Velodyne and established his own company, Tyto LiDAR. As his LiDAR startup was acquired by Otto, which was then bought by Uber, Schwarz had stayed in Uber before joining Luminar. Through continuously strengthening its team, Luminar has begun mass producing its LiDAR units in April 2018 and received funds from Volvo. Currently, Luminar has contracts with 16 OEMs and is still talking with other clients. Volvo and Toyota Research Institute are also its clients.

(Image: Luminar)

Aeva is another LiDAR startup established by two former Apple engineers, Mina Rezk and Soroush Salehian. They were in Apple’s Special project Group which is said to be developing autonomous vehicles. The company has introduced its 4D LiDAR technology which is able to measure the velocity instantly with LiDAR point. Aeva has integrated LiDAR, radar, machine vision and motion sensors to simultaneously measure dense position and dense velocity. According to Aeva, the new technology can avoid physical interference such as sunlight and lead to safer AI algorithms.