ITEM 1. BUSINESS.
Overview
Our vision is to make autonomous transportation safe and ubiquitous. As a global leader in lidar autonomous driving technology, we are enabling the world’s first autonomous solutions for automotive series production in passenger cars and commercial trucks.
Founded in 2012 by President and Chief Executive Officer Austin Russell, Luminar built a new type of lidar from the chip-level up, with technological breakthroughs across all core components. As a result, we have created what we believe is the only lidar sensor that meets the demanding performance, safety, and cost requirements for Level 3 through Level 5 autonomous vehicles in production, bypassing the traditional limitations of legacy lidar technology, while also enabling Level 0 through Level 2 (Advanced Driving Assistance Systems (“ADAS”) and/or Luminar Proactive Safety) with our Proactive Safety solution. Integrating this advanced hardware with our custom developed software stack enables a turn-key autonomous solution to accelerate widespread adoption across automakers at series production scale.
Our lidar hardware and software products help set the standard for safety in the industry, and are designed to enable accurate and reliable detections of some of the most challenging “edge cases” autonomous vehicles can encounter on a regular basis. This is achieved by advancing existing lidar range and resolution to new levels, ensuring hard-to-see objects like a tire on the road ahead or a child that runs into the street are not missed, as well as by developing our software to interpret the data needed to inform autonomous and assisted driving decisions.
Our full-stack hardware and software autonomy solution for cars and trucks as well as our standalone lidar technology offerings have made us one of the leading partners for the world’s top OEMs. We are currently partnering with eight of the top-ten global automakers, by sales, and have the goal of being the first lidar company to produce highway self-driving and next-generation Proactive Safety systems for series production. With approximately 400 employees across eight global locations, we have scaled to over 50 partners in the last two years, including the first industry-wide automotive series production award in the autonomous space, awarded by Volvo Cars in May 2020, with series production expected to commence in 2022. We subsequently entered into a strategic partnership with Daimler Truck AG in October 2020 and with Mobileye Vision Technologies Ltd (“Mobileye”) in November 2020.
The Luminar Difference
We have established ourselves as a global leader in lidar autonomous driving technology, and these are the strengths that not only set us apart today, but we believe will continue to differentiate us in the future:
Breakthrough Technology Delivering What We Believe is the World’s First Auto-Grade Compliant Solution. Reflecting roughly nine years of development at this stage (the first five of which were in stealth), Luminar offers a unique lidar architecture and proprietary component-level innovation (built from the chip-level up), resulting in superior range and resolution capabilities, ensuring confidence in perception across a broad set of operational domains and unlocking the next
generation of vehicle safety. Our lidar and perception software are built upon a longer wavelength lidar design, which has been widely embraced as necessary to broadly deploy truly autonomous vehicles. As a result, we believe that we are the only provider of lidar for automotive autonomy applications that achieves the industry’s stringent requirements and perception capabilities. Our technological prowess and differentiated approach is supported by an extensive intellectual property portfolio of 93 issued patents, in addition to 84 pending or allowed patents as of February 2021.
Highway Autonomy. By developing and deploying the industry’s first lidar technology to meet the stringent requirements required to enable highway autonomy, Luminar will provide its key customers with a dramatic step-function in performance and help enable the first wave of autonomous vehicles—hands-off, eyes-off autonomy for highway-related use cases—which we envision to be rolled out beginning late next year.
Proactive Safety. In addition to enabling hands-off, eyes-off autonomy for highway-related use cases, we see a significant opportunity for our lidar sensing system and software to enhance current ADAS functionality and safety; and reduce collisions across a variety of other operating domains in a proactive rather than reactive capacity. As a result, we foresee insurance-related opportunities, which may either accelerate the adoption of our integrated solution and help to cross-subsidize the implied cost of our system, aided in part through improved economies of scale.
Deeply Integrated Hardware/Software Solution. We believe our Sentinel software offering provides our customers with a turnkey solution that accelerates the ability for OEMs to deliver high-speed highway autonomy and Proactive Safety at commercial series production scale. With over-the-air software updates, the product will be continually refined to ensure continued solution reliance and enhanced performance.
Volvo Series Production Contract. In May 2020, we announced a landmark deal with Volvo Cars for the first automotive series production award for autonomy in the industry. As a result, our hardware and software could power Volvo’s next-generation vehicle platform, called SPA2, on which its future consumer vehicle models will be based. The intent of the program is primarily to enable highway autonomous drive capability as an option on production consumer vehicles, with series production expected to start in 2022. Additionally, the program presents an opportunity to simultaneously enable next-generation Proactive Safety systems in a more widespread capacity at lower cost than autonomous drive upgrades.
Additional Commercial Success with Daimler Truck AG and Mobileye. In October 2020, we announced a strategic partnership with Daimler Truck AG, the world’s largest commercial vehicle manufacturer, to enable highly automated trucking, starting on highways. Our teams work closely together in order to enhance lidar sensing, perception, and system-level performance for Daimler trucks moving at highway speeds. To strengthen the partnership, Daimler Trucks has acquired a minority stake in Luminar. In November 2020, we executed a contract with Mobileye, an Intel company, to supply Luminar lidar for use in Mobileye’s first generation of its Level 4 Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) pilot and driverless fleet in key markets around the world.
Compelling Growth, Margin, and Cash Flow Profile. We believe that our robust customer base and growing list of commercial partnerships creates a compelling growth profile. This is further enhanced by the visibility to series production from existing and developing agreements that would enable rapid growth. Our product cost structure includes exclusive supply agreements for all three of our key lidar components (receiver, ASIC, and laser), enabling us to achieve significant material cost reductions as volume increases for such key hardware components. As we scale production and grow our revenue, we believe our strategy of low capital intensity provides the potential for high shareholder return.
Deep Bench of Industry Leaders. We have a visionary leadership team with a track record of innovation and execution, led by our President and Chief Executive Officer, Austin Russell, to develop a new kind of sensing technology to make autonomous vehicles both safe and ubiquitous. With approximately 400 employees across 8 global locations (including a millennia of man and woman years of lidar-related experience), Luminar has built a deeply experienced team of industry leaders from across the lidar, automotive, technology and autonomy sectors, including senior members from automotive companies such as Daimler-Benz, ZF, VW and Harman and technology companies such as Google, Uber, Motorola and Ocean Optics.
Our Market Position and Leadership
We were founded with the vision of making autonomous transportation safe and ubiquitous. As a global leader in lidar autonomous driving technology, we are enabling the world’s first autonomous solutions for automotive series production in passenger cars and commercial trucks.
The automotive industry is among the largest in the world and features an estimated total addressable market opportunity (“TAM”) for ADAS and autonomous solutions (Level 0 through Level 5) expected to exceed $150 billion by 2030. Our model to capture this opportunity is to directly partner with top established automotive companies in order to power their autonomous future. Correspondingly, we have successfully established partnerships with over 50 companies across three primary application verticals: passenger vehicles, commercial trucks, and robo-taxis. More than 75% of the companies listed in the target ecosystem
chart below are working with Luminar customers. Although not our primary focus, adjacent markets such as aerospace, defense and smart cities offer use cases uniquely suited for and potentially served by our technology.
An important benefit of our engagements with commercial partners is to have our products generally incorporated into our commercial partners’ development programs at the earliest stages. By securing these development wins in a competitive landscape, there is greater increased forward visibility into the long-term development cycle towards series production. This awards us with a significant competitive advantage by positioning us to convert existing development engagements with key automakers into series production awards in the near term, as we have with Volvo Cars and others we expect to finalize in the future.
We have a number of OEM, trucking and robo-taxi-related partners currently in the process of validating our technology, principally using our Hydra lidar sensors (described further below), which is geared toward research and development fleets. We also have a significant number of advanced development partners, in which we see an opportunity to convert into series production awards through 2022. We expect that all series production partners will use our Iris lidar sensors (described further below) for upwards of one million or more vehicles, building on the work already completed with Hydra.
A majority of autonomous vehicle companies have been primarily focused on robo-taxi research and development for urban low speed ridesharing applications (of which we work with many). We are, by comparison, focused for the time being on the highway autonomy use case for production vehicles and are powering the substantial majority of autonomous trucking programs. This presents a unique opportunity for us to enable near-term production deployments over the next few years, while it is expected that higher levels of autonomy for urban robo-taxi applications will take substantially longer to reach scale.
Driving further volume beyond highway autonomy is our Proactive Safety solution, with the goal of ultimately preventing the majority of forward collisions that occur on roads today. With over one million fatalities globally each year from vehicle accidents, there is a clear opportunity to set a new baseline standard for vehicle safety industry-wide.
Current industry ADAS capabilities are enabled primarily by camera and/or radar sensing technologies. Data from both sensor types are commonly merged to provide the vehicle system with some understanding of its driving environment. These systems, however, fall short of delivering substantial safety gains. Today’s ADAS works well under ideal circumstances—at low speed, in ideal weather conditions, and on a test track—however with our Proactive Safety solution, we believe we can decrease the reported collisions occurrence rates by up to seven times.
Launching this bold vision forward, we entered into a landmark deal with Volvo Cars for the first automotive series production award for autonomy in the industry, which was announced in May 2020. Our hardware and software is being integrated into Volvo’s global consumer vehicle platform to power autonomous highway driving and Proactive Safety features, with series production scheduled to take place in 2022. Volvo has historically been a leader in deploying new breakthrough safety-centric technologies into the automotive industry, ranging from the invention of the modern three-point seat belt to the launch of Mobileye’s vision-based ADAS product.
In October 2020, we also announced a strategic partnership with Daimler Truck AG, the world’s largest commercial vehicle manufacturer (through its Freightliner and Western Star Brands), to enable highly automated trucking, starting on highways. Experts at Daimler Truck AG, along with its U.S. subsidiary, Daimler Trucks North America (DTNA) and Torc Robotics, part of Daimler Trucks’ Autonomous Technology Group, are collaboratively pursuing with Luminar a common goal of bringing series-produced highly automated trucks (Level 4) to roads globally. Our teams work closely together in order to enhance lidar sensing, perception, and system-level performance for Daimler trucks moving at highway speeds. To strengthen the partnership, Daimler Trucks has acquired a minority stake in Luminar.
In November 2020, we executed a contract with Mobileye, an Intel company, to supply Luminar lidar for the company’s Autonomous Vehicle Series solution in its next phase of driverless car development and testing, in production volumes at sub-$1,000 cost. As part of the agreement, Mobileye will collaborate with us to use our lidar for the first generation of its Level 4 MaaS pilot and driverless fleet in key markets around the world. Our technology will be used to enable Mobileye’s TRUE REDUNDANCY capability, with multiple self-contained sensor systems to enable uncompromised safety and validation for Level 4 driving.
In March 2021, we announced a partnership with Zenseact to deliver autonomous software for series production vehicles. Volvo Cars is the first launch customer, representing both Luminar’s and Zenseact’s first production design win for software. Luminar’s new product suite, Sentinel, is the first full-stack autonomous solution for series production in the industry. It deeply integrates Zenseact’s OnePilot autonomous driving software solution alongside Luminar’s Iris lidar, perception software, and other components as a foundation, enabling every automaker to offer Highway Autonomy and Proactive SafetyTM capabilities on their production vehicles. While the wider autonomous industry largely focuses on robo-taxi applications, Luminar and Zenseact collectively remain focused on delivering systems into series production vehicles.
In March 2021, we entered into a relationship with SAIC Motor Corporation, the largest automaker in China, pursuant to which Luminar is expected to power the autonomous capabilities and advanced safety features in SAIC’s new R brand vehicles for series production with its industry-leading lidar as well as components of its Sentinel software system. The R brand program is expected to begin series production with Luminar starting in 2022, with the parties’ longer-term goal being widespread standardization across all vehicle lines. As part of the close collaboration, we will also be establishing an office in China to be located in Shanghai alongside SAIC Motor, where SAIC would also be providing local support. The parties expect to deliver the first autonomous production vehicles in China, establishing SAIC’s technology leadership position and Luminar’s production launch in the region.
Market Outlook
There is a worldwide trend towards mobility and e-mobility and a renewed focus on autonomy, specifically highway autonomy for passenger and commercial vehicles. As the market shifts toward electric and hydrogen drivetrains, along with software-defined vehicles delivering a new user experience and data capability, we see the potential of autonomy enabled by the sensing and computing technologies on vehicles and under advanced development today. The roadmap from existing driver assistance and comfort features all the way to self-driving value can be built through improved vehicle situational awareness.
Our products provide this situational awareness in a broad range of driving environments and allow for confident detection and planning at all vehicle speeds. Our portfolio encompasses sensor hardware, and perception and decision-making software that improve existing vehicle features and enable new levels of vehicle automation for consumer and commercial applications. To understand the ADAS and autonomy markets addressed by our products, it is important to understand the levels of automation as defined by The Society of Automotive Engineers (“SAE”).
Although SAE has clearly defined these levels, there continues to be inaccuracies and misuse of the levels leading to consumer misconceptions about the true capability of the vehicle which they purchase. We believe our lidar greatly enhances the lowest levels of autonomy and enables the deployment of the highest levels of autonomy to both the consumer and commercial markets. Below is a more detailed description of the levels of automation.
•Level 0—Active Safety: In this level, the human is fully responsible for all driving functions at all times. “L0” is defined as driver support features that are limited to warnings or momentary driving assistance. Examples of warnings include blind spot warning or lane departure warnings. Examples of features with momentary assistance include automated emergency braking (“AEB”) and lane keep assist (“LKA”). These features are viewed as the basis of active safety, with AEB designed to reduce and/or mitigate the severity of low speed accidents, and LKA designed to prevent vehicles from crossing over into neighboring lanes or even worse, oncoming traffic. These features apply to both passenger and commercial vehicles and are growing as standard features globally and represent the majority of the ADAS market today.
•Luminar value-add: Our lidar’s long range and high resolution capability enables the detection and classification of objects (vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists) in all lighting conditions and inclement weather. We expect this to greatly improve upon today’s systems, and to be much more effective at taking proactive measures to avoid accidents and extending the AEB capability to higher speed driving scenarios. Additionally, the ability to detect lanes out to 150 meters and do so in these same adverse environmental conditions adds to the robustness of LKA systems and helps prevent temporary loss of lanes or lack of detection altogether as often seen in today’s systems.
•Levels 1 and 2—Driver Assist: These levels represent the last levels in which the driver is still fully responsible for all driving functions at all times. “L1” is defined as driver support features that provide steering or braking/acceleration assistance, but not both simultaneously. Examples include lane centering support (“LCS”) or the more widely adopted adaptive cruise control (“ACC”). These features are viewed as comfort features, easing the driving load from the driver during extended highway drives. “L2” captures multiple driving tasks, for example both ACC and LCS simultaneously. In the near future, we expect an increased adoption of these systems as safety protocols begin to require head-on collision assistance which will require simultaneous braking and steering control.
The term L2+ is often used for today’s higher capability systems, many of which add a driver monitoring camera to ensure the human driver remains engaged, but allow them to remove their hands from the wheel completely (eyes must remain on the road). These systems are currently restricted in Europe, but allowed in the United States and other regions of the world in the restricted operational design domain (“ODD”) of divided expressways, high-ways, and typically only in systems with onboard high-definition maps of those expressways. The ramp up of these systems has been slower on the market, mainly due to the additional sensing and compute costs for marginal value-add to the end consumer.
• Luminar value-add: Similar to L0, we expect to greatly improve upon today’s L1 and L2 in performance, robustness and availability. With the ability to detect lanes and precisely measure the distance to a lead vehicle in a single lidar sensor, we can independently give lane assignments to objects ahead. This helps prevent false braking events while driving in ACC mode, making the consumer experience safer and more enjoyable. Add this to the ability to detect lanes independent of lighting conditions, and we add confidence and robustness to nighttime driver support systems as well. As driver confidence in these features grows, we expect the utilization and adoption of such features to increase, leading to higher impact of vehicle safety systems.
•Levels 3 and 4—Highway Autonomy: In these levels, the vehicle can still be operated in normal driving mode. However, when the automated driving function is engaged, the human is no longer responsible for the driving function. “L3” requires that the human driver must take back complete control of the vehicle when requested. “L4” assures the vehicle will continue to function without any human driver intervention, even if in a degraded state. Terms such as “chauffeur” are used for L3, while terms like “pilot” are used for L4, sometimes incorrectly. Further, robo-taxis today are aspiring to L4 but still rely on safety drivers behind the wheel making them L3 systems – including leaders like Waymo. To better quantify a vehicle’s autonomous capabilities, the market has started to assign an ODD and while many are trying to enable L4 for the urban environment, the most logical ODD for L3 and L4 driving is divided expressway or highway.
Subsequently, a vehicle may not have L4 capability from the garage or the docking facility to the highway, but from highway entrance to highway exit, the vehicle can provide L4 functionality for that specific ODD. In 2020, the L3 and L4 markets only exist in development platforms and there are no serial production automotive L3 or L4 systems available. We believe, however, this segment represents significant growth potential and when correctly implemented, will prove valuable to both the consumer and society.
• Luminar value-add: Adding our lidar to these systems improves their robustness and availability, allows sensing redundancy to cameras and radar, and therefore enables true hands-off and eyes-off operation. This allows the driver to utilize their time for something other than supervising the driving function, which is the ultimate product purpose of autonomy.
• Levels 4 and 5—Urban/Full Autonomy: “L5” is essentially the same as L4, but without the ODD restriction. It is the designation for vehicles that when placed in automated driving mode, can drive everywhere and in all conditions without human intervention or even occupants. We group this L4/L5 functionality due to the current focus on urban and suburban driving in the form of robo-taxis. Commercial trucking also aspires to L5 capability but is focusing its L4 efforts on highways as this yields the highest benefit. An urban L4 is extremely complicated compared with highway L4. We do expect that robo-taxis and automated people movers will be a strong growth market, but the timeline is more uncertain and we expect this market growth to be limited while technology for both vehicles and infrastructure matures.
• Luminar value-add: Similar to L3 and L4, we believe lidar is required to deliver L5 sensing and perception needs. Sensing redundancy and multiple modalities are required and perhaps more important since the environment is the most complex, and our lidar’s sensing and perception capability supports the needs of detection and classification in dense, congested, and difficult environments at all hours of the day and night.
While these SAE levels are important to technology developers, we believe the market is currently segmented in two distinct categories: (1) ADAS or driver-assistance, where a human is in the driving loop and responsible, at minimum, to be a safety fallback and in most circumstances directly control part or all of driving tasks; and (2) autonomous driving, where a human is “out-of-the-loop” (colloquially, “hands off” the steering wheel and “eyes off” the road), which generates real value propositions to consumers, such as allowing the driver to recover time, as opposed to mere comfort or novelty features.
Within these two segments, we believe the largest business opportunities exist in the areas of active safety and highway autonomy due to trends in safety technology standardization and consumer pain-point priority. These two applications have well aligned technology requirements that allow us to remain focused on a single product/solution that will allow OEM partners to achieve both. The broader autonomy market segment, specifically robo-taxis, represents strong long-term opportunity, but lidar technology must be seeded now during development even though high-volume production and deployment remains many years away.
These trends and safety needs apply to both the passenger and commercial vehicle markets. The autonomy use case and business case for commercial vehicles are simple: reduce operational costs and increase efficiencies. Passenger vehicles are more complex since the ability to deliver autonomy is more focused on the consumer’s comfort and convenience. We are working to help OEMs and consumers achieve these goals, but with the proper level of safety included. Our lidar is also making traction in other markets, including defense and smart cities, that require high resolution and long-range sensing in uncontrolled operating conditions.
Source: Our estimates, incorporating data from IHS Markit and Wall Street research. Includes passenger and commercial vehicles (including robo-taxi) as well as hardware and software.
The charts above represent today’s market in 2020 for which scanning lidar is limited. The market, however, is expected to grow substantially by 2030 and our technology has the potential to improve or enable capability across the full spectrum of the market. Our initial focus for lidar technology is L3/L4, and we aim to offer the sensing, perception, and function turn-key system that will truly add value and give driving time back to the end consumer. This market is still developing, but represents significant growth, and we are the technology leader with the first L4 highway production platform win with Volvo. In addition, vehicles enabled with our lidar will be capable of proactive safety in which accidents are potentially completely avoided, which can benefit other autonomy solutions such as L1/L2.
Passenger Vehicles
The passenger vehicle market is very large. We expect that more than approximately 100 million new passenger vehicles will continue to be manufactured year-over-year through 2030 and beyond. It is very difficult to replicate this volume in other markets, but it is also important to recognize that highway autonomy is not yet standard equipment. In order to realize a vehicle feature’s maximum societal benefits, the ultimate goal in the automotive industry is to achieve widespread adoption of the highway autonomous feature in all vehicles. We expect a technology adoption ramp-up over time as automated functionality
matures, costs and pricing are reduced, and consumers become more familiar with the full benefits and capabilities of a safe autonomy system. We believe there is a substantial market opportunity for our products when proactive safety is coupled with autonomy due to the public benefit of the overall anticipated safety increase.
ADAS
ADAS volumes are primarily driven by both the European and North American markets. The European New Car Assessment Program (“NCAP”) requires a minimum level of crash mitigation functionality such as AEB (for vehicles, pedestrians, and cyclists), LKA, speed alert systems and other ADAS features for a vehicle to have a 5-star rating. Furthermore, the European Union is moving toward mandates of these advanced functions.
The U.S. is less focused on mandates at this time and instead allows the U.S. NCAP (known as the “Stars on Cars” program) and designations such as the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety “Top Safety Pick” and “Top Safety Pick+” to drive adoption and provide consumers with an understanding of the vehicle’s advanced crash avoidance capability. Additionally, in working with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (“NHTSA”), 20 automakers pledged to voluntarily equip virtually all new passenger vehicles by September 1, 2022 with a low-speed AEB system that includes forward-collision warning. With global safety rating programs and the OEMs competing to deliver more safety and comfort features to their customers, it is reasonable to expect near complete adoption of ADAS functionalities in new vehicles produced by Europe, U.S., Japan, and South Korea by 2026. We expect adoption rates to increase significantly in China as well.
Tesla’s “Autopilot” is an example of establishing a driver support (as defined by SAE) platform as standard equipment. They developed a vehicle around the promise of future functionality which supports the production volume and cost reduction needed to spread technology beyond premium, low volume platforms. We expect more OEMs to demand proactive safety and limited autonomy with the ability to upgrade functionality over time without hardware change. This expectation aligns well with the increasing number of OEMs developing new vehicle platforms that span their lineups.
Proactive Safety
While the increased application of existing ADAS technology should help lessen the number of accidents and fatalities, we believe there is significant room for improvement concerning standard ADAS and crash avoidance. Today, the ADAS systems are designed to mitigate or lessen the severity of accidents and only avoid them under certain low-speed or ideal environmental conditions. Recent data suggests that the number of automotive fatalities globally still exceeds one million annually and the social costs of accidents continue to exceed $500 billion in the United States alone. As the autonomy market matures, we expect that OEMs and global NCAP programs will extend the functionality to intersection and crossing scenarios, which requires wider fields-of-view and faster detection. Global safety rating programs are also considering night and low-light performance in the future, further pushing the existing technology’s limits. We believe there is a significant opportunity to be able to reduce collisions with a capable lidar sensing system and software which can enable an understanding of the environment, which can help to avoid collisions by taking over the steering wheel and braking systems proactively. Our lidar is capable of significantly increasing the effectiveness of these active safety systems and supports proactive safety and greater crash avoidance measures using our long-range, high resolution, wide Field-of-view, and perception software to be able to detect pedestrians and cyclists in the most challenging and complicated environmental sensing conditions. Furthermore, high-speed safety performance, specifically AEB, is increasingly important as hands-free highway driving assist systems are further delivered to the market, and the vehicles take on more of the driving responsibility.
Highway Autonomy
Since inception, our focus has been to enable safe and ubiquitous autonomy and we view highway autonomy, in combination with proactive safety, as providing the most value to the end consumer for the foreseeable future. The market is also trending in this direction, targeting hands-off and eyes-off operations in a more controlled setting than the urban environment. While there is a significant focus on investment and development of robo-taxi solutions, passenger vehicles continue to be a voluminous market, and we expect the growth rate of highway automated functions to have a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of nearly 40% from 2020 until 2030.
Commercial Trucking Market Outlook
The amount of goods transported by trucking globally continues to rise year-over-year. While the number of newly manufactured trucks has declined in recent years, the application of ADAS technology continues to grow and the interest in autonomy for transport is at an all-time high. The business case for trucking highway autonomy is simple: lower operating costs and increased availability of the vehicles and time spent on the road (trucking and fleet companies do not get paid to park at rest stops).
The application of AEB has been in the market for many years, with the first mandate for vehicle AEB in Europe in 2013, and growing application of the functionality since. Similar to passenger vehicles, Europe leads the market in a unified safety direction and has put mandates in place to drive lane keeping functions and expand the AEB functionality to include
pedestrians and cyclists. This leadership is also a result of a market driven by the trucking manufacturers who set the technology distribution of vehicles and the ADAS vehicles and systems architectures. Unfortunately, the trucking market in North America is heavily driven by the fleet operators’ specifications and is heavily fragmented. The lack of mandates from governing bodies has resulted in a market for ADAS that is very difficult to quantify and gain economies of scale across a small set of partners as is the case in Europe. As in passenger vehicles, our lidar technology and sensing capability could greatly improve the L0 and L1 functionality for the trucking market as well. However, our focus and the value add seen globally by the OEMs and fleet operators is L4 highway autonomous driving.
L4 highway autonomy is the target ODD for trucking because that is where their money is earned and where the majority of the physical truck’s time is spent. The sensing needs between Europe, North America, South Korea, Japan, and other regions globally all differ slightly, but have similarities in the requirement for (i) long range detection to aid in extra braking time, (ii) farther detection of lanes to aid in proper lane centering and placement of potential obstacles in the correct lanes, and (iii) the vertical field of view and high placement on the cab to support close proximity detection in front of the vehicle, as well as overhead obstacles (such as bridges and overhead signs).
Robo-Taxi and Delivery Market Outlook
The press announcements of large robo-taxi investment and partnerships between technology companies, both established and startup, and mainstays from the automotive industry dominate the industry’s attention. This application is, however, the most difficult vehicle autonomy feature to solve for technically. It requires the ability to detect and classify hundreds of objects and predict motion for many of those objects, including pedestrians, electric scooters, and bicycles—all of which present as pedestrians, but move in very different ways. The environment consists of dynamic weather, steam from manholes and exhaust pipes, and oftentimes construction equipment causing dust and debris. Given the economic benefit an automated robo-taxi driving system could unlock, billions of dollars in funding and engineering efforts have been focused on developing solutions. The majority of the autonomous vehicle companies are operating in this space, awaiting a market that requires complex governmental support, funding for infrastructure, and a sensing and compute solution that must anticipate every possible mixed-traffic scenario.
Additionally, the initial ODD only requires low to medium speed operation, which can be met with less capable sensors. We expect that ultimately, the ODD will need to expand to the highway as robo-taxis and automated shuttle services move people from city centers to the airport and back, in particular. We expect limited robo-taxi R&D programs will continue to operate in varying levels of development and testing the rest of this decade.
Adjacent Markets
Although not our primary focus, the adjacent markets below offer use cases uniquely suited for and potentially served by our technology. Our goal is to scale our core markets and utilize our robust solutions to best serve these adjacent markets where it makes sense for us and our partners.
•Smart Cities. Many government agencies are motivated to invest in smart cities solutions such as “Smart” intersections and “Intelligent” tolling systems due to macroeconomic trends such as usage of electric vehicles (and the subsequent reduction in fuel taxes) and growing city populations (and the subsequent need to manage assets more efficiently). As discussed above with trends of urban living and the need to manage traffic flow and congestion, not only is there a market for the vehicles themselves but also for the infrastructure to support such automation. Today, many global cities have a defined Smart City initiative to be delivered over the coming years, with over 50% of these initiatives being in Europe and North America. The market is broken up into segments: smart buildings, transportation, infrastructure, healthcare, energy, security, and education. We will focus on infrastructure and security: traffic flow and intersection management, tolling and traffic management, smart parking and security, pedestrian and crowd flow management and security, and large venue security.
•Aerospace and Defense. The aerospace and defense markets are intent on increasing their autonomous capability and lidar is a key component to enabling such automation, including for items such as an automated convoy for resupply or an automated refueling mission. These markets represent a small volume, but with very specific requirements that only certain technologies will be able to meet. We will utilize our sensing and system architecture from our core automotive system and provide solutions in this space and/or partner with companies who can help deliver specific solutions licensing our high performance technology.
Our Solution Overview
We bring opportunity and inspiration to an automotive industry that requires continuous technological and performance innovation, and play a critical role in making the future of mobility safer. The hope for autonomy is not just novelty – it is the critical feature required to transform the way people and goods move throughout the world transportation ecosystem. Autonomy presents an opportunity to save lives through enhanced safety, liberate those who struggle with transportation access,
and reoptimize value chains of logistics and vehicle ownership. We seize this opportunity by delivering what we believe is the world’s first autonomous solution for series production, powering highway autonomy and proactive safety.
High-performance lidar is not just another sensor. While it is true that lidar is a sensor, its value is more than just hardware and delivering a point cloud “image.” It is similar to radar and cameras in that these devices provide no direct value without the signal processing, detection, tracking, and perception software that gives an understanding of the vehicle’s surroundings. The next product offering levels are to provide route planning and command the steering, braking, and engine actuators to control the vehicle. This will require lidar producers to follow the precedents set by camera and radar, where sensor providers supply perception software (they are, after all, the experts in that sensor’s data).
Many companies have developed lidar sensors, but not all have developed lidar systems. A lidar product offering can be broken down as follows:
Lidar: For customers with a full complement of vehicle system software development, this product enables their development of vehicle functions through a sensor hardware product.
Highway Autonomy: A full vehicle function product combining hardware and software for driver out-of-the-loop on highways.
Proactive Safety: A full vehicle function product combining hardware and software that continuously monitors, but only momentarily acts to avoid collisions on all road types.
As the requirements of a lidar system increase, the number of competitors tends to quickly decrease. We were founded with the understanding that the most effective lidar solution will have perception that can deliver the complete desired solution through the OEM to the end consumer. Many OEMs, via their camera experience, have outsourced everything to the supply base, except function development. Many have outsourced even this functionality and are starting to weigh the benefit of having a proprietary solution to using a more standardized, off-the-shelf product that saves them time and money.
Commercial Overview
We partner with the majority of key OEMs focused across three verticals: passenger vehicles, trucking, and robo-taxi. More than 75% of the companies listed in the target ecosystem chart below are Luminar customers. Furthermore, we have strong demand for our products in multiple adjacent market verticals.
An important benefit of our engagements with commercial partners is to have our products generally incorporated into our commercial partners’ development programs at the earliest stages. By securing these development wins in a competitive landscape, there is greater increased forward visibility into the long-term development cycle towards series production. This awards us with a significant competitive advantage by positioning us to convert existing development engagements with key automakers into series production awards in the near term, as we have with Volvo Cars and others we expect to finalize in the future.
We have a number of OEM, trucking and robo-taxi-related partners currently in the process of validating our technology, principally using our Hydra lidar sensors (described further below), which is geared toward research and development fleets. We also have a significant number of advanced development partners, in which we see an opportunity to convert into series production awards through 2022. We expect that all series production partners will use our Iris lidar sensors (described further below) for upwards of one million or more vehicles, building on the work already completed with Hydra.
In the near term, we are focused on the passenger vehicle and trucking markets, which we believe will drive our ability to increase market share and achieve economies of scale.
Passenger Vehicles
Due to the complexity and challenging environment of urban driving, we believe that the industry will focus on highway autonomy in the near future. Our series production award with Volvo, a global leader in automotive safety, is a key example. Our lidar technology will power Volvo’s first fully self-driving technology for highways in their next-generation production passenger vehicles, enabling true driver out-of-the-loop functionality, which we expect will set new standards of safety for the industry.
By 2030, we anticipate we will have approximately 4% vehicle penetration rate across the industry. Today, a majority of our current partners have a highway autonomy program in development with an anticipated start of production year ranging from 2023 to 2025. Leveraging our hardware and software for series production also paves the way for future proactive safety use cases in vehicles. We believe our lidar unlocks greater crash avoidance capability than today’s active safety systems and will help deliver what it calls “proactive safety” to the consumer – higher speed emergency braking, enhanced lane keeping functionality, and significantly improved performance and availability in inclement weather and low-visibility conditions. Given our performance-differentiated products and Volvo’s safety DNA, Volvo is considering making our lidar standard on all vehicles in the future, which would further enable and accelerate the adoption of our technology to several automotive partners.
This, in turn, increases our ability to scale incorporation of our products into additional passenger vehicles relative to our competitors, which we believe is a significant advantage. With production expected to start with Volvo in 2022, we will have an industrialized, automotive-grade product ready to deploy and the ability to leverage existing capacity with an efficient use of capital to support our commercial partners globally.
Commercial Trucking
We work with a significant majority of self-driving truck start-ups and traditional truck OEMs. Our commercial partners greatly value the long perception range that our sensors enable while operating on highways. Our technology enables the detection of road debris such as tire remnants or stalled traffic at ranges greater than 250 meters, as well as motorcycles darting through traffic at highway speeds. We believe the short-range performance of the vast majority of lidar providers is insufficient against those and other scenarios and inadequate to provide the level of safety required by commercial trucking companies operating on public motorways.
We work directly with our commercial partners to optimize our products for their applications. A few highlights of this optimization include our developments of unique scan patterns for maximized point density in specific areas of interest and models for sensor placement that minimize blind spots around the cab. Our commercial partners use between one to four lidar sensors per truck, and we expect that all will eventually integrate three or four if they move forward to series production.
We enable our commercial trucking partners to consider three and four sensor configurations because of our expected unit economics. While the trucking market has less price sensitivity than the passenger vehicle market to support a multiple sensor configuration, it still benefits from the economies of scale achieved in the higher volume passenger vehicle market. Our commercial trucking development partners also appreciate that our passenger vehicle development comes with automotive-grade standards implemented in our product design and manufacturing processes. This enables our commercial trucking development partners to leverage our success with passenger vehicles and access the technology required to deploy much sooner than if they had worked with our competitors. We believe this is significant to them as the economic incentive for self-driving trucks is more compelling than for passenger vehicles since truckload carriers in North America and Western Europe aggressively compete for freight down to a difference of tens of dollars. Self-driving technology will enable truckload carriers to eliminate drivers on their terminal to terminal lanes and subsequently eliminate 25% to 30% of their costs for hauling freight. They will use that savings to win more desirable freight business. Adding to truckload carriers’ sense of urgency to deploy self-driving truck technologies is the chronic shortage of drivers. For these reasons, we believe self-driving trucks will start to operate on highways as early as 2023 and steadily ramp up through the remainder of the decade.
Autonomy is a true economic enabler for the logistics market, including terminal to terminal, drayage and even last-mile delivery. The benefits of proactive safety discussed as part of our consumer vehicle products also apply to trucking.
Robo-Taxi and Delivery Vehicle Market
While robo-taxi and self-driving shuttle development primarily focus on low-speed urban environments today, their full value will only be met if they can also operate at higher speeds to expand their operating area, such as highways leading to airports. Our technology helps them achieve those goals by expanding this operating area to include roadways with speeds greater than 45 mph. Moreover, by using our perception software, our commercial partners can utilize their limited engineering resources more efficiently and enable them to focus on solving issues associated with vehicle system integration and driving in complex, urban environments. Our technology complements their work and will enable them to deploy their fleets sooner.
We expect there will be a number of locally dedicated robo-taxi R&D fleets continuing to launch through the next decade, which will begin with human safety drivers monitoring operation at all times and then transition to no human monitor as the fleet gains confidence in the safety of the system.
Adjacent Markets
The on-road vehicle markets are what drive our product development decision-making, especially in sensor hardware development, but the need for nearly identical performance exists in other markets as well. These markets commonly cannot match the economies of scale that automotive markets offer, but together they represent strong business opportunities. Therefore, we take an opportunistic approach to the broader lidar and perception markets, with particular near-term focus on the following.
•Smart Cities. We are working with our partners to integrate our sensors and perception software into existing solutions to make those solutions perform at high levels. Our technology enables those systems to detect and respond to vehicles at much greater ranges than legacy technology, and its perception software enables more reliable classification and prediction of objects within the area of interest. For example, cities will be able to reduce accidents at troublesome intersections and avoid expensive redesign projects, and tolling agencies can reduce the number of missed vehicles and increase their revenue yield. Many other applications benefit from our technologies’ superior performance, and we are working with partners to enable new benefits for their customers.
•Aerospace & Defense. Aligned with our mission of enabling the autonomous movement of people and goods, we work with large aerospace/defense contractors on applications that extend off-road. While our products are used in many different applications, most involve enabling some form of autonomous drive capability. We anticipate entering into multi-year supply agreements with our defense contractor partners in this market to generate a significant number of sensor sales in the future. We also expect that most of our defense contractor partners will integrate our perception software into their solutions.
There is a significant difference between a development platform project and automotive-grade production. Many lidar companies have created development products. These products are used for multiple applications, including environmental mapping for autonomous driving perception. Some of these development products began with huge spinning lidar sensors placed on top of vehicles that were ideal for viewing 360° around the vehicle, in order to better understand the challenges associated with autonomy and help solve those challenges. They were deployed in robo-taxi and autonomous trucking applications, and a myriad of off-road applications to scope the role of 3D sensing. While relatively successful to date at establishing incumbent positions in all applicable markets, almost none of these products have transitioned to automotive-qualification or military standardization specification, which is required for series production. Many lidar companies have elected to shift their focus from automotive to other adjacent markets due to the deficiencies in their technical approach to lidar or the sheer organizational difficulty and cost in delivering automotive-grade products. Many of those adjacent markets are looking to leverage scale and reuse from the automotive market, with the understanding that it is very difficult to replicate a potential market of approximately 100 million units per year (passenger vehicles and commercial vehicles combined worldwide). With a clear roadmap and a development platform that seamlessly transitions into the production platform, we believe we are well-positioned to establish the mass-scale market for lidar as the key markets’ leadership position.
Our Products
We believe we have established a dominant position in a crowded lidar market for three critical reasons: product, thought leadership, and deployment. Our products are designed and built from the ground up for the automotive market, and our performance exceeds those of our competitors. Our lidar and perception software forges a path for consumer 1550nm technology, which has been widely embraced as the long-range wavelength region necessary to widely deploy truly autonomous vehicles. We believe we are the only lidar company with deeply integrated hardware and software products, and this depth is supported by an extensive intellectual property portfolio of 93 issued patents, in addition to 84 pending or allowed patents as of February 2021.
We believe our products meet or exceed the requirements to enable safe autonomy at all levels, and we have turned this capability into a position of thought leadership in the market. From small technology companies to global OEMs, our over 50 commercial partners look to us for guidance on how to specify, test, and integrate lidar into their products. Our broad technical competency spans hardware, software, and system safety disciplines. This leadership role often begins with our product as a reference sensor in validating lesser performing sensors, including other lidar, radar, and cameras. From this, we have been successful in converting to platform deployments as our roadmap to series production has become more immediate.
Vehicle platform deployments determine the scope and design of a partner’s series production vehicle system, and are therefore our anchor for future growth. Sensor changes in these development platforms are not taken lightly by the industry, and the closer these test vehicles get to feature demonstration, the more difficult it will become to displace our technology. Our products have won platform development positions in most of the world’s top automakers and autonomous trucking programs, in both cases often displacing legacy lidar providers. Broad deployments in a host of different vehicles and countries provide us with a global fleet multiplier, which will unlock future capabilities as we seek to broaden automation capabilities. With a clear roadmap to an automotive-qualified product expected by 2022 as part of Volvo’s next generation consumer vehicles based on Volvo’s SPA2 platform, the rest of the market now has direct line of sight to our first wave of driver out-of-the loop vehicle features and services. Once partners scope their series production vehicle system based on their development platforms with us embedded, we believe there is a higher likelihood of successfully closing a design win for the series production.
Our Iris lidar sensor integrated into Volvo SPA2 platform with expected production in 2022
ADAS has commoditized the idea of vehicle safety, but has not delivered the full promise of this technology, as discussed further in the section entitled “Technology Comparison” located below. Therefore, a large opportunity exists to build on this foundation of vehicle features. We plan to use our market position and technology leadership to create a new class of vehicle features aimed at maximizing the safety impacts of high-performance sensory perception. Given more than 90% of motor vehicle accidents in the U.S. are due to driver perception or action failure, our proactive safety initiative addresses crash avoidance features instead of merely severity mitigation features. To support and accelerate the delivery of a complete lidar-based ADAS and Level 4 highway autonomy program, we are expanding our software team. This expansion began with the addition of former members of Samsung’s Munich-based DRVLINE platform team previously responsible for delivering ADAS functionality for its mobility enterprise.
Whole-Products for Growth
A whole-product is everything that is required to ensure that targeted end customers can fulfill their compelling reason to buy. For us, this means doing more than delivering the best possible lidar sensor. It means we will:
•maintain sensing superiority through advanced sensor development;
•provide actionable data through continual perception software refinement; and
•drive vehicle feature delivery through internal and external investment.
Sensing Superiority
We have successfully delivered on our roadmap to date for lidar and software technologies to enable autonomy programs like those envisaged for Volvo’s SPA2 platform expected to begin in late 2022. Following nearly five years in stealth developing our core architecture, key components and filing associated patents, in 2017, we introduced a prototype product, known as Model G, which brought custom technologies together to demonstrate what was possible from long-range, high-resolution lidar. In 2018, we launched Hydra, our product for testing and development programs, and in mid-2019 we launched Iris, our commercial volume-production product. In January 2020, we launched our perception stack, which we believe will lead to smarter sensing over time. Our Hydra, Iris and other products are described in further detail below:
Luminar’s Hydra lidar sensors are dynamically configurable dual-axis scan sensors that detect objects up to 500 meters away over a horizontal field of view of 120° and a software configurable vertical field of view of up to 30°. High point densities in excess of 200 points per square degree enable long-range detection, tracking, and classification over the whole field of view.
Hydra lidar sensors and electronic compute unit
Luminar’s Iris lidar sensors leverage the same core technology components in Hydra, but Iris is refined to meet the size, weight, cost, power, and reliability requirements of automotive qualified series production. Iris features two fully custom integrated circuits – driving both laser transmitter and receiver. The sophistication of the Iris lidar data outputs comes from four generations of deployed integrated circuit design, and supports our ability to stay ahead of market demands for data.
Currently commercialized vehicle autonomy technology only incorporates Level 1 and Level 2 ADAS, or partial automation made possible with cameras and radar, and enhanced by lidar. We expect to become a commercially viable long-range lidar for automotive applications in Level 3 through Level 5 of vehicle autonomy, including full highway autonomy and urban and suburban autonomous driving. We believe Iris will be an efficient, automotive-grade, and affordable solution for series-production programs starting production in 2022.
Iris lidar sensor
With camera-like resolution of more than 300 points per square degree and high data fidelity, Iris reliably sees where objects are and understands what they are, even at long distances and in inclement weather. Combined with ongoing software updates, Iris becomes more capable over time, unlocking the roadmap to autonomy and broadening driver assistance.
Sensing More
We selected lidar as our primary sensing architecture in part because it is an effective active sensor, meaning it has its own source of light (laser) that it emits to detect targets, rather than a passive sensor which depends on reflected sunlight to measure targets. When designed appropriately, the sensor can capture large amounts of information about the targets – well beyond three dimensions (3D). Even today, as it only scratches the surface of what we expect lidar can bring to autonomy, we provide more than a 3D scene. Through a pipeline of signal processing in each point-cloud point, common surfaces can be identified, moving objects can be better understood, and target reflectance provides grey scale contrast to the scene. All these pieces of information are called point attributes, and they feed perception algorithms that ultimately discern what the targets are within a scene. The more information perception algorithms are given, the faster and more reliable the results become.
Looking forward, we are exploring ways to extract environmental information of things people can intuit, but machines must measure. For example, understanding air motion would allow software to estimate objects’ weight and assess the danger to vehicles. The optics and photonics community has produced countless capabilities like these for metrology applications. We are developing this deep understanding of what is possible with the market’s mobility needs to create products that deliver continually increasing value.
Our Software
If a vehicle is to take an action on the road (e.g., accelerate, brake or steer) without human control, or even override human control, it must have an understanding of the driving environment. This understanding is called perception. The requirements for perception, and subsequently for the sensors providing necessary information underlying it, ultimately come from questions the vehicle system needs to have answered continuously to execute driving maneuvers safely in the real world. These questions are the same ones the human brain must continually assess to drive:
•Where is the road, how is it organized into lanes, and which is the proper lane?
•What driving rules apply to these lanes (e.g., lane change permission, speed, direction, traffic type)?
•How is the vehicle moving now (speed, direction)?
•What obstacles and other fellow travelers are in or near the roadway?
•Where are these external objects (which lane, sidewalk, etc.), and how are they moving?
With a confident and continuous understanding of the driving environment from our perception software, routes can be planned, risks can be assessed and actions can be sent to the vehicle’s control system. We, working closely with our partners, expect to deliver this full vehicle system capability.
Core Sensor Software: Our lidar sensors are highly configurable and capture valuable information extracted from the raw point-cloud to promote the development and performance of perception software. Therefore, core sensor software features help our commercial partners to integrate, control, and enrich the sensor data stream before perception processing. These features include:
•Automatic sensor discovery to expedite system startup time;
•Extrinsic calibration to automate multi-lidar geometrical alignment;
•Proprietary middleware to streamline advanced user interaction with both our hardware and software;
•Horizon tracking to automate region-of-interest scanning focused where it matters most, the road ahead;
•Normal vector point attributes to associate common surfaces like drivable space quickly and accurately assess object headings without multiple frames; and
•Velocity vector point attribute to provide both radial and crossing velocities, point-by-point within each frame.
Sentinel Software Tools: In March 2021, we introduced our new software product suite, Sentinel. Sentinel is the first full-stack autonomous solution for series production and deeply integrates Zenseact’s OnePilot autonomous driving software solution alongside Luminar’s Iris, lidar, perception software and other components as a foundation, enabling every automaker to offer Highway Autonomy and Proactive Safety capabilities. We plan to sell Sentinel both as a complete “turn-key” software solution to our customers to enable Highway Autonomy or just with our Perception Software or other specific software capabilities.
Perception Software: Our advanced perception software builds on the core sensor software features and transforms lidar point-cloud data into actionable information about the integrated vehicle (ego) and its environment. These features include:
•Semantic Segmentation—Each measured point contains an object class attribute. This feature enables smart detection and tracking algorithms as well as intelligent vehicle reactions to different types of objects.
•Instance detection and Tracking—Frame-level instance detection of objects, lane markings as well as road surfaces and free space combined with our highway-focused tracking algorithms provide reliable, safe and stable data for decision-making algorithms.
•State Estimation—Continually predicting and correcting an object’s location, velocity, and orientation through lidar odometry, real-time mapping, and localization.
Our perception software detecting, tracking, and classifying vehicles, lanes, objects, and drivable free-space, up to 250 meter away, in real-time.
We provide velocity point cloud attributes at both the point and object level.
Our velocity attribute measures objects moving both laterally and longitudinally.
High-level Vehicle Function Software
•Highway Autonomy: In order to deliver highway autonomy to OEMs like Volvo, we leverage Zenseact and other ecosystem partners and strong internal understanding of the full autonomy system. Highway autonomy will enable exit to exit functionality that takes full responsibility of the driving task even if the driver does not resume control in edge case emergencies. Early roll outs will be in limited highways, in limited environmental conditions and broaden as validation activities ensure safe ODD expansion. This capability is meant to allow passenger vehicles and commercial trucks alike to take occupants out of the driving loop so that they can utilize their time on other tasks. Further, highway autonomy systems will leverage over the air updates allowing them to grow even safer over time and expand their ODD through the life of the vehicle.
•Proactive Safety: Our proactive safety capabilities in development are expected to represent a new generation of vehicle safety, meant to enable accident avoidance instead of merely mitigating crash severity. It is expected to serve as a continuously monitoring system that assesses risk to the vehicle and recommends corrective actions and more importantly intercedes proactively when a crash is imminent. This feature utilizes our extended range of confident situational awareness to broaden the ODD of legacy ADAS features, new safety features, and driver out-of-the-loop autonomous features.
Autonomy Compute: Our electronic compute unit (“ECU”) is designed to accelerate the development of perception systems. Raw point-cloud inputs via ethernet, from up to four lidar sensors, are sent through a pipeline of processing layers to provide automated field coverage, enriched point-clouds, and ultimately, the perception outputs required for fusion and path planning.
Hydra currently features a reference ECU that can run the full software pipeline described below on four sensors covering 360° with under 40 watts of power consumption. The software pipeline is built modularly and is compute-hardware agnostic, allowing us to integrate algorithms into any OEM domain controller regardless of chip provider preference.
Hydra electronic compute unit for testing and development programs
Iris is an advanced lidar perception solution for series-production autonomy that we believe solves the fundamental problem of reliable, long-range sensory perception for real-world self-driving vehicles. From autonomous highway driving to full autonomy in urban areas, Iris is configurable with one or multiple perception enhanced lidar sensors to fit consumer and commercial application needs. It is an efficient, automotive-grade, and affordable solution for series-production programs starting production in 2022. In order to deliver Iris, and build beyond perception into vehicle functions, we plan to leverage partners in both processing chips and vehicle system controllers to deliver the hardware necessary to meet the performance and cost goals necessary to enable proactive safety and highway autonomy for broad adoption.
Accelerating Delivery
We intend to enable autonomy and invent next-generation safety through continually identifying gating technologies required for progress and creating paths to deliver innovation through both internal development and partnering.
Looking beyond sensory perception into vehicle functions, the mission of proactive safety requires technologies to optimize driver engagement and take control of driving functions when necessary. Finally, we believe that, while vehicle connectivity will not reduce the need for on-vehicle sensory perception, there is value in collaborative perception from all vehicles. Allowing vehicles to effectively see around corners and through traffic is expected to increase collision avoidance by a substantial amount. Therefore, we will seek to continue to collaborate with industry participants as these connectivity systems emerge, ultimately giving each Luminar enabled vehicle the collective understanding of all Luminar enabled vehicles in the driving environment.
Remaining Focused
From the beginning, we have taken a whole product mindset to product development leading to growth beyond sensor development. Balancing this mindset, however, is our desire to accelerate the time to market of these whole-products. Therefore, we focus relentlessly on products aligned with our targeted markets, partners where possible, and innovate where necessary to best serve complete solutions to those markets. As a result, we offer no short range only lidar products due to existing camera, radar, and ultrasonic capabilities that adequately serve this demand in automotive. We do not dilute our portfolio in hopes of finding a niche – we have identified the root requirements for large scale applications and deliver products to make them successful as efficiently as possible.
For us to continue winning series production contracts, great sensors and perception alone are not sufficient, as other technologies are required to deliver the expected whole-product (including other sensors, higher levels of software, electronics infrastructure, and compute). We have, therefore, constructed an ecosystem of partners to streamline both the vision for and delivery of whole vehicle system products. Healthy ecosystems for cameras, radar, and their associated perception exist to serve the automotive market, and supporting infrastructure exists to support current features such as electronic stability control and LKA. Computer hardware is evolving, and progress is required before achieving the cost and power targets for broad consumer vehicle adoption. However, the path to achieving these targets continues to develop as companies execute on platform development programs and scope their series production targets, driving large enough demand to justify development and tooling.
Technology Comparison
There are two primary methods to compare our technology with the market:
•How we perform against and complement entrenched, non-lidar sensing technologies currently in-use; and
•How we perform against potential lidar competitors.
Below is a discussion of today’s technology (ADAS) and the sensors that support it (camera, radar), followed by an explanation of lidar performance and specifically how our lidar fares within the competitive landscape.
Legacy Sensing Technologies
Current industry ADAS capabilities are enabled primarily by camera and/or radar sensing technologies. Data from both sensor types are commonly merged to provide the vehicle system with some understanding of its driving environment. These systems, however, fall short of delivering substantial safety gains.
ADAS aims to assist the driver in identifying specific dangerous situations and acting on their behalf in certain cases. Currently, the most advanced ADAS will brake and steer the vehicle when the human driver does not respond, but the features do not consistently react to a dangerous situation ahead. Today’s ADAS works well under ideal circumstances – at low speed, in ideal weather conditions, and on a test track. However, in adverse environmental conditions, the performance sharply deteriorates. We believe that with our Proactive Safety solution, we can decrease the reported collisions occurrence rates by up to seven times.
As we continue to evaluate available technologies for lidar and develop our roadmap to complete vehicle features, we seek to continue to actively monitor all other technologies, such as radar and camera sensing. Many of these technologies complement lidar (discussed below) and have pre-existing platform positions with automakers.
Commodity Components in Automotive
Camera. Cameras can be categorized into two important capabilities, monocular (2D, commonly referred to as mono cameras) and binocular (3D, commonly referred to as stereo cameras). Mono camera perception is the primary ADAS sensing component today and moving toward near complete adoption in new vehicles in Europe, the U.S., South Korea, and Japan. China also shows significant adoption increase, albeit far from standard equipment. It delivers a large set of perception capability which enables many functions that are widely offered to consumers: LKA; LCS; automatic high beam control; traffic sign recognition; and, in some cases, ACC. Mono cameras also support a wide range of ADAS safety cases whereby the detection and classification of objects enable crash mitigation. For instance, AEB for vehicles, cyclists, pedestrians, and animals is largely enabled by camera perception technology. The main benefit of mono cameras is their low cost. However, with this low cost comes limitation. Beyond performance degradation in poor environmental conditions, the distance measurement to an object is just an estimation based on the object scale and not a true measurement. This limits the mono cameras’ ability to robustly measure the distance and understand the trajectory of an object and, therefore, has limited ability to safely control the vehicle.
To combat the range measurement deficiencies of mono cameras, some OEMs and Tier-1 suppliers have decided to develop stereo cameras which use two separate cameras, set apart by a particular distance, to deliver the same functions as mono cameras but with a much better depth estimation. While this works well at short range depth estimation, extending to longer ranges requires wide separations, sensitive optical alignment, and very high resolution – all things that eliminate the commodity pricing benefit of cameras. Furthermore, like mono cameras, stereo cameras are limited in inclement weather, and performance is heavily dependent on optical alignment and lighting.
Radar. When it comes to ADAS technology, radar has been viewed as the pioneer. The first application of radar in passenger vehicles dates back to approximately 1998, where ACC was first offered to consumers. Adopted from military applications, long-range radar and mid-range radar were placed at the front of the vehicle to specifically detect lead car distance and speed. There have been many technological advancements in radar, but the functionality delivered is largely the same: a
very accurate distance and speed measurement of objects, but little to no understanding of what they are, or precisely where they are horizontally or vertically. The volume driver of radar has been the AEB function as OEMs use camera and radar fusion to increase the robustness of their low-speed ADAS offerings and deliver NCAP 5-star vehicles that mitigate the severity of accidents.
Radar is usable in nearly all weather and environmental conditions (except for heavy snow) and works at all times of the day. Given the benefits radar brings to fusion systems, its robustness and its cost (significant commoditization of radar has occurred in the past decade), it is likely to remain a staple for today’s ADAS systems and we see radar adoption growing towards near complete adoption by 2026, including surround sensing for functions such as blind spot detection, cross traffic alert, and lane-change merge assistance.
Lidar wavelengths around 1,550 nanometers (such as ours) are approximately 2,000 times shorter than radar wavelengths (>3mm); this allows for resolution capabilities approaching that of cameras. Radar can theoretically achieve <1.0° resolution, but the device’s physical size must become very large in order to achieve this, and delivering <0.1° (like lidar) approaches physical impossibility. Therefore even “imaging radar” can, at best, only approach the performance of very low performance lidar, which does not unlock any new valuable features for the automotive industry. Furthermore, the maturity of these advanced radar technologies is less commercially mature than lidar and thus these advanced radar technologies may never find a price/value fit in the automotive industry until they become as low cost as today’s commodity radar. As such, there is minimal growth potential for radar technology in terms of added functionality. Rather, there is likely a market for 1550 nanometer lidar for replacement of forward-looking applications given the large perception capability gains that unlock next-generation features.
Sensors to enable autonomy
Given their performance in ADAS, there is little confidence that radar and cameras alone will enable autonomous driving, as evidenced by the vast majority of autonomous driving development efforts globally. There are many views about the difficulty of achieving fully autonomous driving and the sensing technology required to get there. However, with every fatal crash due to camera and/or radar perception failure in semi-automated vehicles in the market today, the need for better 3D sensing and processing becomes more apparent. Lidar has the potential to be that key sensor, and our lidar leads the way with proprietary technology and perception systems to unlock this next generation roadmap of vehicle features.
Lidar Purpose and Requirements. We believe lidar is a necessary complement to existing cameras and radar in systems pursuing proactive safety and fully autonomous driving. High performance lidar combines the classification capabilities of cameras, the direct object distance measurement capability of radar, and adds a direct 3D drivable space assessment that neither method can deliver, and which is critical to AD.
Intelligently combining these three sensing modalities provides high confidence perception in a broad set of operational domains, unlocking the next generation of vehicle safety.
We believe a vehicle’s vision must be strong for all use cases-there is no compelling long-term use case for short-range lidar alone.
These top-level requirements are met as a single operating mode, not just one at a time, by our lidar, which is a critical reason our partners see rapid progress after integration. The key, top-level requirements are:
• Range
• Resolution
• Field-of-view
• Fidelity
• Frame rate.
We believe that to provide long-term value through the necessary use cases, no single performance metric should be sacrificed for another. All are critical and must be met simultaneously. Additionally, safety and safe autonomy are not only needed during clear weather and good lighting conditions, but rather they must perform in all conditions a person would drive in, and hopefully more. Therefore, the sensing technology must perform in all weather and all lighting conditions and it must be uninfluenced by interference from the sun and other lidar signals that may be present in the environment.
Top-Level Requirements:
Iris lidar sensors are designed to meet all of these requirements in one streamlined package. Every aspect of our lidar was intended to be designed to safely meet the functional performance needed to unlock highway autonomy. The chart below shows a comparison of the technical design selections made by the rest of the market and how they fare compared to the technical design selections made by us based on our internal assessments.
All data sourced from Luminar and other lidar company spec sheets and physics.
The “Ranging” category captures how a sensor measures each pixel’s range, and the “Field Coverage” category captures how a sensor collects all those pixels from around the scene. While there are many differentiation points covered below, it is critical to focus on wavelength (light “color”) choice as it is a matter of eye safety. Near-visible infrared wavelengths, such as 905nm, are more hazardous to eyes than longer wavelengths because even though not visible, their energy is still focused onto the retina. 905nm is the most common lidar wavelength, and it is indeed very close to visible for humans (850nm light can commonly be seen as a dim red). Therefore, these sensors are severely limited in how much light they can safely send into the world for measurements. This is why we, very early on, committed to a longer wavelength lidar design – something that began as controversial and has become the market expectation for long-range lidar.
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Design Area
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Common Lidar Architectures
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Luminar
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Lidar Architecture
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Wavelength
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905nm
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1550nm
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• Range limited by eye-safety
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• Low cost with single pixel Ingas
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• Resolution limited by eye-safety
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• Allows for long range, high resolution
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• Allows for deeper weather penetration
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Ranging
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FMCW
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Single-pulse time of flight
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• Range/Resolution limited by continuous wave measurement
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• Low complexity, low part-count
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• Costly due to high transceiver count
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• High rate measurements with high confidence
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Single Photon Detection
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• Range/Resolution limited by continuous wave measurement
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• Costly due to large, complex detector array
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Scanning
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Flash
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Low-mass, encoded mirror scanning
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• Range limited by eye-safety
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• Scanning of an isolated, field of view
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• Costly due to large, complex detector array
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• Low noise and rejection of uncontrolled light (sun, headlights, other lidar)
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Spinning 1D Array
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• Lifetime limited due to massive mechanical motor
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• Software reliability limited by noise and artifacts
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• Costly due to high alignment burden and component count
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MEMS
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• Range/Resolution limited by high noise
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• Angular precision limited by fragile, non-micro scanner
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• Software reliability limited by noise and artifacts
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Optical Phased Array
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• Range limited due to transmit loss
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• Resolution limited due to poor beam control and quality
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• Low reliability due to side-lobe illumination
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Whether the design decision is based on achieving the lowest possible price or utilizing an existing technology or supplier, these selections have tradeoffs that impact performance and lessen the sensor’s usefulness in the vehicle market. Our analysis here is focused on what is required for vehicular safety and autonomy. Our lidar endeavors to minimize such tradeoffs and, through innovation, delivers a product to enable robust safety and true autonomy.
Multiple Sensors and Fusion. Much of what we see in the vehicle market today is fusion of camera and radar, which typically addresses medium and high-speed applications at low levels of autonomy (hands-on, eyes-on). As radar provides a significantly more robust distance measurement than stereo cameras, the industry has generally elected to use mono camera technology and radar together with only a few customers continuing to use the stereo-camera technology. We see this as an interim technology as mono camera capability improves with increases in the number of pixels, and as lidar capability increases and pricing reaches a level that can be implemented affordably for all vehicle segments. These sensors work independently from one another, have different sensing modalities, so are not typically subject to the same failures, and work reasonably well in identifying obstacles and avoiding them. Ultrasonic sensors are another sensor type used for detection and ranging and usually used at low speed (less than 8 km per hour) and parking applications. These sensors are sometimes also fused with cameras to enable more automated parking functions. They are also used for blind spot detection functions, but the detection range is limited to no more than 10 meters, and radar is the more common sensor.
As technology advances up the autonomy levels to allow hands-off and eyes-off driving, the requirement for sensing robustness, redundancy, precision, and accuracy become more and more critical. As noted in the “Legacy Sensing Technologies” section above, radar and camera alone can help mitigate accidents. The fusion of these two provides a reasonably good sensing solution, but typically only in ideal weather conditions. Today this solution set serves a majority of the market for ADAS to help achieve NCAP 5-star ratings globally and by 2026, will push the application of this technology toward standard equipment. From there, the ADAS market growth levels off, as does the effectiveness and benefit of just camera/radar fusion alone. Safety is essential at all times of the day, in many different weather and lighting conditions. To achieve the objective of zero fatalities, a lidar that meets all of the requirements outlined above is necessary.
For highway autonomy, safety is paramount to allow the consumer to utilize more of their driving time to handle other tasks. A lidar that meets all of the requirements outlined here must be implemented for AEB (vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists, crossing cyclist, intersection, left turn across the path), head-on collision avoidance, and all other critical safety functions that should operate at lower and higher speeds to drive down the nearly 35,000 U.S. deaths per year still caused by auto accidents.
Competition
The market for lidar-enabled vehicle features, on and off road, is an emerging one with many potential applications in the development stage. As a result, we face competition for lidar hardware business from a range of companies seeking to have their products incorporated into these applications. We hold a strong position based on both product performance and maturity, but also in our ability to develop beyond the sensor itself into software functions.
Although we believe that we are the only provider of lidar for automotive autonomy applications that achieves the industry’s requirements and perception capabilities to enable safe hand-off, eyes-off driving, we face potential competition from Tier 1 companies, and other technology companies. It will take these new emerging technologies a substantial period of time to achieve new levels of lidar capabilities. We believe many of our competitors offer more limited solutions for niche applications and are often non-automotive. In the meantime, our software development will differentiate our product offerings away from “lidar only” making it more difficult for lidar competitors to become broadly adopted.
Some lidar competitors are currently selling solutions that offer lower levels of sensor performance in ADAS, a demand we do not see substantiated in the market due to low cost competition from camera and radar-based perception solutions for low levels of autonomy. While lidar competitors will continue to emerge and recede, our high performance lidar with a strong intellectual property portfolio and software products establish barriers to those who follow.
Beyond automotive, the adjacent markets, including delivery bots and mapping, among others, for lidar are highly competitive. There are entrenched incumbents and competition, including from China, particularly on ultra-low cost products that are widely available.
Within the automotive autonomy software space, the competitive landscape is still nascent and primarily focused on developing robo-taxi technologies rather than automotive-grade autonomy for highway applications. Their software technology generally depends on legacy sensing suites that are ubiquitous across the industry and lacking in performance capabilities to enable safe autonomy.
We believe our technology and continuing innovation will support our position as a leader in advancing lidar technology in the market based on several market differentiators.
Intellectual Property
Our success and competitive advantage depend in part upon our ability to develop and protect our core technology and intellectual property. We own a portfolio of intellectual property, including patents and registered trademarks, confidential technical information, and expertise in the development of lidar technology and software for autonomous vehicles.
We have filed patent and trademark applications in order to further secure these rights and strengthen our ability to defend against third parties who may infringe on our rights. We also rely on trade secrets, design and manufacturing know-how, continuing technological innovations, and licensing and exclusivity opportunities to maintain and improve our competitive position. Additionally, we protect our proprietary rights through agreements with our commercial partners, supply-chain vendors, employees, and consultants, as well as close monitoring of the developments and products in the industry.
As of February 2021, we owned 93 issued patents and have 84 pending or allowed patent applications, including U.S. and foreign. In addition, we have three registered U.S. trademarks, 16 registered foreign trademarks and five pending trademark applications. Our patents and patent applications cover a broad range of system level and component level aspects of our key technology including, among other things, lidar system, laser, scanner, receiver, and perception technology.
Scalable Manufacturing Process
We have internally developed the manufacturing and testing processes, including capturing any related intellectual property, necessary to develop our products. Building or designing critical components in-house rather than using off-the-shelf commodity components provides for protectable and sustainable technology differentiation from lidar competitors or alternative technologies. We believe significant barriers to entry for automotive lidar are the processes and know-how to manufacture a compact and intricate sensing product. Our manufacturing processes and knowledge are a key differentiator for us in the market. The product concept and design-for-manufacturing were considered as part of the product development process from the beginning of our product development.
Instead of relying on external resources to develop our product solutions, we have developed these skills and capabilities in-house, leveraging key hires’ expertise in the industry and establishing an advanced engineering team. We have developed solutions for optical alignment, high precision placement of silicon within the required tolerance to deliver the specified performance, and worked with suppliers on end-of-line testing for a cost-effective long-range detection system.
Iris Product Industrialization and Manufacturing Globalization
Iris is the third commercial generation lidar platform to be developed by us (after Model G and Hydra). In Iris’s development, we have leveraged two prior cycles of learning and shipping for faster time-to-market as it is being developed and prototyped in the same facilities by the same teams as its predecessor generations. Both the operations and engineering teams are co-located to ensure that our manufacturing and engineering teams work hand-in-hand.
We expect Iris will first launch as a North American-built product with the first sensor assembly expected to be in an International Automotive Task Force (“IATF”)-certified plant in Mexico at our anticipated lead contract manufacturer. We expect the supply chain will include critical technology suppliers from around the world.
This anticipated lead contract manufacturer also has IATF-certified locations in Europe and Asia. These factories would be brought online as volume dictates, and as we achieve scale and supplier localization in specific regions to best support our global commercial partners.
Material Agreements
Volvo Series Production Contract
In March 2020, we entered into a series production contract with Volvo Car Corporation (“Volvo”) to equip our products into its next-generation vehicle platform, called SPA2, for which its future consumer vehicle models will be based. The intent of the program is primarily to enable highway autonomous drive capability as an option on production consumer vehicles, with series production expected to start in 2022. Additionally, the program presents an opportunity to simultaneously enable next-generation proactive safety systems in a more widespread capacity at lower cost than autonomous drive upgrades.
Pursuant to the agreement, we are currently collaborating with Volvo in an agile framework that is relatively novel to the automotive industry and traditionally associated with software development. This agile method allows for close interactions between our and Volvo’s teams to produce high quality work products on faster paced timelines than is traditionally associated with automotive companies.
Under the agreement, Volvo and we have each agreed to make certain relevant investments to enable the greatest possible success of the program. As part of this, Volvo is currently compensating us for certain work products as the program progresses to Start of Production (SOP) in 2022.
The agreement contains certain minimum volume targets for several geographies for specified periods for specific vehicle models. The production volumes will ultimately be highly dependent on numerous factors including end consumer feature take rate, larger automotive industry demand, and the speed at which we are able to scale to meet such demand, all of which are not binding for either party.
Following an automotive grade production audit and qualification of our advanced manufacturing factory in Orlando, Florida, under the agreement Volvo has certified us to produce lidar sensors for them out of our internal facility, with the opportunity to outsource series production to a third party pending Volvo’s automotive quality certification.
The agreement is a long-term, multi-year contract that terminates fifteen years following the end of Volvo’s series production involving our products. Volvo or we may terminate the agreement for cause under certain conditions, including if we undergo a change of control, at an earlier time.
Research and Development
Our research and development activities occur in Orlando, Palo Alto, and Colorado Springs in the United States, and in Munich, Germany. Orlando is primarily focused on developing sensor hardware, firmware, and controllers, and Palo Alto
develops perception software. We are also expanding software development with a new team in Germany. The Colorado Springs location creates the custom ASIC chips used in our lidar sensors.
Our research and development team is responsible for creating new technology and expanding lidar and perception software functionality. The team also designs the physical product, ensures it is designed for manufacturability and performs testing. The team also partners with our operations and supply chain functions to develop scalable commercial and reliable manufacturing processes and direct production material procurement.
Sales and Marketing
We take an insight-driven, account-based marketing approach to build and expand our relationships with commercial partners. We collect feedback directly from commercial partners to garner insights that help drive the business and product. We also work with analysts and higher education institutions to conduct studies, test and validate technology performance, providing key proof points for commercial partners considering our products. In parallel, marketing and communications drive our brand equity and narrative through ongoing announcements, campaigns, events, speaking opportunities, and public relations efforts.
Government Regulation
At both the federal and state level, the U.S. has provided a positive legal environment to permit safe testing and development of autonomous functionality. We do not anticipate any near-term federal standards that would impede the foreseeable deployments of our lidar technology. Some states, however, particularly California and New York, still enforce certain operational or registration requirements for certain autonomous functions. We believe such hurdles will be removed as state regulators gain better experience with the technology. U.S. federal regulations, however, remain largely permissive of deployments of higher levels of safe and responsible autonomous functionality.
Foreign markets such as the EU and China also continue to develop their respective standards to define deployment requirements for higher levels of autonomy. Given the intense work in these areas, we expect a workable path forward in the near-term.
As vehicles equipped with our sensors are deployed on public roads, we will be subject to the legal and regulatory authorities of principally the NHTSA. The obligations of motor vehicle equipment manufacturers include regular reporting under the Transportation Recall Enhancement, Accountability and Documentation Act process as well as strict recall and reporting requirements for any defects related to highway safety or any non-compliance with a Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard. Similar such reporting and recall requirements exist in foreign markets. As the development of federal, state and foreign legal frameworks around autonomous vehicles continue to evolve, we may be subject to additional regulatory schemes.
As a lidar technology company, we are subject to the Electronic Product Radiation Control Provisions of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. These requirements are enforced by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”). Electronic product radiation includes laser technology. Regulations governing these products are intended to protect the public from hazardous or unnecessary exposure. Manufacturers are required to certify in product labeling and reports to the FDA that their products comply with applicable performance standards as well as maintain manufacturing, testing, and distribution records for their products.
Similarly, as a global company deploying cutting-edge technology, we are also subject to trade, customs product classification and sourcing regulations. Finally, our operations are subject to various federal, state and local laws and regulations governing the occupational health and safety of our employees and wage regulations. We are subject to the requirements of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Act, as amended, and comparable state laws that protect and regulate employee health and safety.
Like all companies operating in similar industries, we are subject to environmental regulation, including water use; air emissions; use of recycled materials; energy sources; the storage, handling, treatment, transportation and disposal of hazardous materials; and the remediation of environmental contamination. Compliance with these rules may include permits, licenses and inspections of our facilities and products.
Employees
We have always prioritized the team’s importance, with values-based hiring that encompasses competency, ingenuity, and culture. Through multiple growth phases, we have drawn talent and leadership from the automotive, aerospace, and consumer electronics industries to achieve its vision. As of December 31, 2020, excluding contractors, we had 368 full-time employees and four part-time employees worldwide consisting of 17 in Europe, 81 in California, 243 in Florida, 24 in Colorado and seven in other locations. None of our employees are represented by a labor union, and we consider our employee relations to be in good standing. To date, we have not experienced any work stoppages.
Our human capital resources objectives include, as applicable, identifying, recruiting, retaining, incentivizing and integrating our existing and new employees, advisors and consultants. The principal purposes of our equity and cash incentive plans are to attract, retain and reward personnel through the granting of stock-based and cash-based compensation awards, in order to increase stockholder value and the success of our company by motivating such individuals to perform to the best of their abilities and achieve our objectives.
Facilities
Our corporate headquarters is located in Orlando, Florida, where we lease a complex of three buildings with 120,716 square feet pursuant to leases that expire between October 2022 and September 2024. The Orlando facilities contain manufacturing, engineering, research and development, and administrative functions. We also lease 36,419 square feet of office and engineering space in two facilities in Palo Alto, California and 12,900 square feet of office and engineering space in a facility in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The Company believes its existing facilities are adequate for its current requirements.
Legal Proceedings
From time to time, we may become involved in actions, claims, suits, and other legal proceedings arising in the ordinary course of our business, including assertions by third parties relating to intellectual property infringement, breaches of contract or warranties or employment-related matters. We are not currently a party to any actions, claims, suits or other legal proceedings the outcome of which, if determined adversely to us, would individually or in the aggregate have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
Corporate Social Responsibilities and Sustainability
We are committed to active and responsible corporate citizenship. In the second quarter of 2020, we formalized our Corporate Social Responsibility (“CSR”) program to streamline the existing compliance and social justice activities within the company. The CSR program is divided into seven elements (diversity and inclusion; human resources; finance/accounting; responsible sourcing; environmental, health and safety; trade compliance; and business ethics), each spearheaded by company leaders and subject matter experts in their respective areas. The CSR team will act to support, advise, and provide mutual oversight for each element and drive reasonable and measurable advancement.
ITEM 1A. RISK FACTORS.
Risk Factor Summary
Investing in our securities involves a high degree of risk. You should carefully consider all information in this Annual Report on Form 10-K, including our consolidated financial statements and related notes appearing elsewhere in this prospectus and “Management’s discussion and analysis of financial condition and results of operations,” before purchasing our securities. These risks are discussed more fully in the section titled “Risk Factors.” These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, the following:
•general economic uncertainty and the effect of general economic conditions on our industry in particular, including the level of demand and financial performance of the autonomous vehicle industry and market adoption of lidar;
•our history of losses and whether we will continue to incur significant expenses and continuing losses for the foreseeable future;
•the effect of continued pricing pressures, automotive original equipment manufacturers (“OEMs”) cost reduction initiatives and the ability of automotive OEMs to re-source or cancel vehicle or technology programs which may result in lower than anticipated margins, or losses, which may adversely affect our business;
•our ability to protect and enforce its intellectual property rights;
•whether tours lidar products are selected for inclusion in autonomous driving or ADAS systems by automotive OEMs or their suppliers;
•our inability to reduce and control the cost of the inputs on which we rely, which could negatively impact the adoption of our products and our profitability;
•changes in personnel and availability of qualified personnel;
•the effects of the ongoing coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic or other infectious diseases, health epidemics, pandemics and natural disasters on Luminar’s business;
•our ability to remediate the material weakness in its internal controls over financial reporting;
•our ability to transition to an outsourced manufacturing business model;
•our anticipated investments in and results from sales and marketing and research and development (“R&D”);
•the success of our customers in developing and commercializing products using our solutions;
•our estimated total addressable market;
•the amount and timing of future sales;
•whether the complexity of our products results in undetected defects and reliability issues which could reduce market adoption of our new products, damage our reputation and expose us to product liability and other claims;
•strict government regulation that is subject to amendment, repeal or new interpretation and our ability to comply with modified or new laws and regulations applying to our business;
•our ability to recognize the anticipated benefits of the recently consummated Business Combination, which may be affected by, among other things, competition, and our ability to manage our growth and expand our business operations effectively;
•whether the concentration of our stock ownership and voting power limits the stockholders of our ability to influence corporate matters; and
•the increasingly competitive environment in which we operate.
Risk Factors
Risks Related to Our Business and Industry
We are an early stage company with a history of losses, and we expect to incur significant expenses and continuing losses for the foreseeable future.
We have incurred net losses on an annual basis since our inception. We incurred net losses of $362.3 million and $94.7 million for the years ended December 31, 2020 and 2019, respectively. We believe that we will continue to incur operating and net losses each quarter until at least the time we begin commercial deliveries of our lidar-based products, which are not expected to begin until 2022 and may occur later or not at all. Even if we are able to successfully develop and sell our lidar solutions, there can be no assurance that they will be commercially successful. Our potential profitability is dependent upon the successful development and successful commercial introduction and acceptance of our lidar solutions, which may not occur.
We expect the rate at which we will incur losses to be significantly higher in future periods as we:
•continue to utilize our third-party partners for design, testing and commercialization;
•expand our production capabilities to produce our lidar solutions, including costs associated with outsourcing the production of our lidar solutions;
•expand our design, development, installation and servicing capabilities;
•build up inventories of parts and components for our lidar solutions;
•produce an inventory of our lidar solutions; and
•increase our sales and marketing activities and develop our distribution infrastructure.
Because we will incur the costs and expenses from these efforts before we receive incremental revenues with respect thereto, our losses in future periods will be significant. In addition, we may find that these efforts are more expensive than we currently anticipate or that these efforts may not result in revenues, which would further increase our losses.
Our limited operating history makes it difficult to evaluate our future prospects and the risks and challenges we may encounter.
We have been focused on developing lidar products for autonomous driving systems since 2012. This relatively limited operating history makes it difficult to evaluate our future prospects and the risks and challenges we may encounter. Risks and challenges we have faced or expect to face include our ability to:
•produce and deliver lidar and software products of acceptable performance;
•forecast our revenue and budget for and manage our expenses;
•attract new customers and retain existing customers;
•comply with existing and new or modified laws and regulations applicable to our business;
•plan for and manage capital expenditures for our current and future products, and manage our supply chain and supplier relationships related to our current and future products;
•anticipate and respond to macroeconomic changes and changes in the markets in which we operate;
•maintain and enhance the value of our reputation and brand;
•effectively manage our growth and business operations, including the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on our business;
•develop and protect intellectual property;
•hire, integrate and retain talented people at all levels of its organization; and
•successfully develop new solutions to enhance the experience of customers.
If we fail to address the risks and difficulties that we face, including those associated with the challenges listed above as well as those described elsewhere in this “Risk Factors” section, our business, financial condition and results of operations could be adversely affected. Further, because we have limited historical financial data and operate in a rapidly evolving market, any predictions about our future revenue and expenses may not be as accurate as they would be if we had a longer operating history or operated in a more predictable market. We have encountered in the past, and will encounter in the future, risks and uncertainties frequently experienced by growing companies with limited operating histories in rapidly changing industries. If our assumptions regarding these risks and uncertainties, which we use to plan and operate our business, are incorrect or change, or if we do not address these risks successfully, our results of operations could differ materially from our expectations and our business, financial condition and results of operations could be adversely affected.
We continue to implement strategic initiatives designed to grow our business. These initiatives may prove more costly than we currently anticipate and we may not succeed in increasing our revenue in an amount sufficient to offset the costs of these initiatives and to achieve and maintain profitability.
We continue to make investments and implement initiatives designed to grow our business, including:
•investing in R&D;
•expanding our sales and marketing efforts to attract new customers;
•investing in new applications and markets for our products;
•further enhancing our manufacturing processes and partnerships;
•pursuing litigation to protect our intellectual property; and
•investing in legal, accounting, and other administrative functions necessary to support our operations as a public company.
These initiatives may prove more expensive than we currently anticipate, and we may not succeed in increasing our revenue, if at all, in an amount sufficient to offset these higher expenses and to achieve and maintain profitability. The market opportunities we are pursuing are at an early stage of development, and it may be many years before the end markets we expect to serve generate demand for our products at scale, if at all. Our revenue may be adversely affected for a number of reasons, including the development and/or market acceptance of new technology that competes with our lidar products, if certain automotive OEMs or other market participants change their autonomous vehicle technology, failure of our customers to commercialize autonomous systems that include our solutions, our inability to effectively manage our inventory or manufacture products at scale, our inability to enter new markets or help our customers adapt our products for new applications or our failure to attract new customers or expand orders from existing customers or increasing competition. Furthermore, it is difficult to predict the size and growth rate of our target markets, customer demand for our products, commercialization timelines, developments in autonomous sensing and related technology, the entry of competitive products, or the success of existing competitive products and services. For these reasons, we do not expect to achieve profitability over the near term. If our revenue does not grow over the long term, our ability to achieve and maintain profitability may be adversely affected, and the value of our business may significantly decrease.
If our lidar products are not selected for inclusion in autonomous driving systems or ADAS by automotive OEMs or their suppliers, our business will be materially and adversely affected.
Automotive OEMs and their suppliers design and develop autonomous driving and ADAS technology over several years. These automotive OEMs and suppliers undertake extensive testing or qualification processes prior to placing orders for large quantities of products such as our lidar products, because such products will function as part of a larger system or platform and must meet certain other specifications. We spend significant time and resources to have our products selected by automotive OEMs and their suppliers, which is known as a “design win.” In the case of autonomous driving and ADAS technology, a design win means our lidar product has been selected for use in a particular vehicle model. If we do not achieve a design win with respect to a particular vehicle model, we may not have an opportunity to supply our products to the automotive OEM for that vehicle model for a period of many years. In many cases, this period can be as long as five to seven or more years. If our products are not selected by an automotive OEM or its suppliers for one vehicle model or if our products are not successful in that vehicle model, it is unlikely that our product will be deployed in other vehicle models of that OEM. If we fail to win a significant number of vehicle models from one or more of automotive OEMs or their suppliers, our business, results of operations and financial condition will be materially and adversely affected. For more information about certain risks related to product selection, see the Risk Factor captioned “The period of time from a design win to implementation is long and we are subject to the risks of cancellation or postponement of the contract or unsuccessful implementation.”
Our forward looking estimates of certain financial metrics may prove inaccurate.
We use various estimates in formulating our business plans. We base our estimates upon a number of assumptions that are inherently subject to significant business and economic uncertainties and contingencies, many of which are beyond our control. Our estimates therefore may prove inaccurate, causing the actual amount to differ from our estimates. These factors include, without limitation:
•the extent to which customers who have selected Luminar for a program win commercially launch vehicles which include our hardware and software products;
•the extent to which Luminar meets contractual terms and conditions;
•the extent to which our technology is successfully integrated into our customers’ vehicles;
•the timing of when our customers adopt our technology into their vehicles on a commercial basis which could be delayed for regulatory, safety or reliability issues unrelated to our technology;
•undetected or unknown errors, defects or reliability issues in our hardware or software which could reduce the market adoption of our new products;
•loss of business with respect to, the failure or lack of commercial success of a vehicle model for which we are a significant supplier for reasons unrelated to our technology; For more information about certain risks related to discontinuation or loss of business, see the Risk Factor captioned “The discontinuation, lack of commercial success, or loss of business with respect to a particular vehicle model or technology package for which we are a significant supplier could reduce our sales and adversely affect our profitability;”
•a decline, for any reason, in the production levels of our customers, particularly with respect to models which incorporate our technology;
•customer cancellations of their contracts;
•if Luminar’s products are included as part of a vehicle option package, the extent to which end customers select it; and
•other risk factors set forth in this Annual Report.
Information concerning our future cost of goods sold (COGS) and bill of materials (BOM) estimates may prove inaccurate.
We periodically provide estimates of future cost of goods sold and bill of materials, which by necessity, are projections based on anticipated rates of future production of our customers and the timing of related expenditures, and there are uncertainties inherent in the creation and interpretation of such data.
While we have successfully locked in an estimated sub $100 hardware cost (assuming certain volume estimates are met) in the supply agreements for all three of our key lidar components (receiver, ASIC and laser), which is a subset of our BOM, most of our components are manufactured using technologies that are highly complex and consequently, estimates of BOM and cost of goods sold may fluctuate due to many variable factors and assumptions, including but not limited to the following:
•meeting certain volume estimates;
•our reliance on key inputs and our inability to reduce and control the cost of such inputs;
•our dependence on producing or sourcing certain key components and raw materials at acceptable price levels and our ability to adequately reduce and control the costs of such key components; For more information about certain risks related to our reliance on key inputs and our inability to reduce and control the costs of such inputs, see the Risk Factor captioned “We are reliant on key inputs and our ability to reduce and control the cost of such inputs could negatively impact the adoption of our products and our profitability;”
•the risk of shortages and long lead times in the supply of key components and the risk that our suppliers discontinue or modify components used in its products; For more information about certain risks related to reliance on third party suppliers, see the Risk Factor captioned “We rely on third-party suppliers and because some of the raw materials and key components in our products come from limited or single source suppliers, we are susceptible to supply shortages, long lead times for components, and supply changes, any of which could disrupt our supply chain and could delay deliveries of our products to customers;”
•lack of consistency and adequate quality and quantity of piece parts, other raw materials and other bill of materials items;
•contract negotiations and the execution of firm supply agreements;
•future versions of our product design incorporating new components meeting our customers’ requirements and specifications. For more information about certain risks related to product selection, see the Risk Factor captioned “The period of time from a design win to implementation is long and we are subject to the risks of cancellation or postponement of the contract or unsuccessful implementation;”
•the qualification of new versions of our key components. For more information about certain risks related to qualification, see the Risk Factor captioned “If our lidar products are not selected for inclusion in autonomous driving systems or ADAS by automotive OEMs or their suppliers, our business will be materially and adversely affected;”
•defects in production processes (including system assembly) either within our facilities or at our suppliers;
•any transitions or changes in our production process, planned or unplanned; and
•other risk factors set forth in this Annual Report.
We are reliant on key inputs and our inability to reduce and control the cost of such inputs could negatively impact the adoption of our products and our profitability.
The production of our sensors is dependent on producing or sourcing certain key components and raw materials at acceptable price levels. If we are unable to adequately reduce and control the costs of such key components, we will be unable to realize manufacturing costs targets, which could reduce the market adoption of our products, damage our reputation with current or prospective customers, and harm our brand, business, prospects, financial condition and operating results.
Continued pricing pressures, automotive OEM cost reduction initiatives and the ability of automotive OEMs to re-source or cancel vehicle or technology programs may result in lower than anticipated margins, or losses, which may adversely affect our business.
Cost-cutting initiatives adopted by our customers often result in increased downward pressure on pricing. We expect that our agreements with automotive OEMs may require step-downs in pricing over the term of the agreement or, if
commercialized, over the period of production. In addition, our automotive OEM customers often reserve the right to terminate their supply contracts for convenience, which enhances their ability to obtain price reductions. Automotive OEMs also possess significant leverage over their suppliers, including us, because the automotive component supply industry is highly competitive, serves a limited number of customers and has a high fixed cost base.
Accordingly, we expect to be subject to substantial continuing pressure from automotive OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers to reduce the price of our products. It is possible that pricing pressures beyond our expectations could intensify as automotive OEMs pursue restructuring, consolidation and cost-cutting initiatives. If we are unable to generate sufficient production cost savings in the future to offset price reductions, our gross margin and profitability would be adversely affected.
We expect to incur substantial R&D costs and devote significant resources to identifying and commercializing new products, which could significantly reduce our profitability and may never result in revenue to us.
Our future growth depends on penetrating new markets, adapting existing products to new applications and customer requirements, and introducing new products that achieve market acceptance. We plan to incur substantial, and potentially increasing, R&D costs as part of our efforts to design, develop, manufacture and commercialize new products and enhance existing products. Our R&D expenses were $38.7 million and $37.0 million for the years ended December 31, 2020 and 2019, respectively, and are likely to grow in the future. Because we account for R&D as an operating expense, these expenditures will adversely affect our results of operations in the future. Further, our R&D program may not produce successful results, and our new products may not achieve market acceptance, create additional revenue or become profitable.
Although we believe that lidar is the industry standard for autonomous vehicles and other emerging markets, market adoption of lidar is uncertain. If market adoption of lidar does not continue to develop, or develops more slowly than we expect, our business will be adversely affected.
While our lidar-based smart vision solutions can be applied to different use cases across end markets, nearly all of our revenue is generated from automotive applications with a few customers in the aerospace and defense, construction, mining and aviation sectors. Despite the fact that the automotive industry has engaged in considerable effort to research and test lidar products for ADAS and autonomous driving applications, the automotive industry may not introduce lidar products in commercially available vehicles. We continually study emerging and competing sensing technologies and methodologies and we may add new sensing technologies. However, lidar products remain relatively new and it is possible that other sensing modalities, or a new disruptive modality based on new or existing technology, including a combination of technology, will achieve acceptance or leadership in the ADAS and autonomous driving industries. Even if lidar products are used in initial generations of autonomous driving technology and certain ADAS products, we cannot guarantee that lidar products will be designed into or included in subsequent generations of such commercialized technology. In addition, we expect that initial generations of autonomous vehicles will be focused on limited applications, such as robo-taxis, and that mass market adoption of autonomous technology may lag behind these initial applications significantly. The speed of market growth for ADAS or autonomous vehicles is difficult if not impossible to predict, and it is more difficult to predict this market’s future growth in light of the economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although we currently believe we are a leader in lidar-based systems for the autonomous vehicle market, by the time mass market adoption of autonomous vehicle technology is achieved, we expect competition among providers of sensing technology based on lidar and other modalities to increase substantially. If commercialization of lidar products is not successful, or not as successful as we or the market expects, or if other sensing modalities gain acceptance by developers of autonomous driving systems or ADAS, automotive OEMs, regulators and safety organizations or other market participants by the time autonomous vehicle technology achieves mass market adoption, our business, results of operations and financial condition will be materially and adversely affected.
We are investing in and pursuing market opportunities outside of the automotive markets, including in the aerospace and defense, aviation, construction, mining, security and city infrastructure sectors. We believe that our future revenue growth, if any, will depend in part on our ability to expand within new markets such as these and to enter new markets as they emerge. Each of these markets presents distinct risks and, in many cases, requires us to address the particular requirements of that market.
Addressing these requirements can be time-consuming and costly. The market for lidar technology outside of automotive applications is relatively new, rapidly developing and unproven in many markets or industries. Many of our customers outside of the automotive industry are still in the testing and development phases and we cannot be certain that they will commercialize products or systems with our lidar products or at all. We cannot be certain that lidar will be sold into these markets, or any market outside of automotive market, at scale. Adoption of lidar products, including our products, outside of the automotive industry will depend on numerous factors, including: whether the technological capabilities of lidar and lidar-based products meet users’ current or anticipated needs, whether the benefits of designing lidar into larger sensing systems outweigh the costs, complexity and time needed to deploy such technology or replace or modify existing systems that may have used other modalities such as cameras and radar, whether users in other applications can move beyond the testing and development phases and proceed to commercializing systems supported by lidar technology and whether lidar developers such as us can keep pace
with rapid technological change in certain developing markets and the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the length of any associated work stoppages. If lidar technology does not achieve commercial success outside of the automotive industry, or if the market develops at a pace slower than we expect, our business, results of operation and financial condition will be materially and adversely affected.
We may experience difficulties in managing our growth and expanding our operations.
We expect to experience significant growth in the scope and nature of our operations. Our ability to manage our operations and future growth will require us to continue to improve our operational, financial and management controls, compliance programs and reporting systems. We are currently in the process of strengthening our compliance programs, including our compliance programs related to export controls, privacy and cybersecurity and anti-corruption. We may not be able to implement improvements in an efficient or timely manner and may discover deficiencies in existing controls, programs, systems and procedures, which could have an adverse effect on our business, reputation and financial results.
We rely on third-party suppliers and because some of the raw materials and key components in our products come from limited or single source suppliers, we are susceptible to supply shortages, long lead times for components, and supply changes, any of which could disrupt our supply chain and could delay deliveries of our products to customers.
Some of the components that go into the manufacture of our solutions are sourced from third-party suppliers. To date, we have produced our products in relatively limited quantities for use in R&D programs. Although we do not have any experience in managing our supply chain to manufacture and deliver our products at scale, our future success will depend on our ability to manage our supply chain to manufacture and deliver our products at scale. Some of the key components used to manufacture our products come from limited or single source suppliers. We are therefore subject to the risk of shortages and long lead times in the supply of these components and the risk that our suppliers discontinue or modify components used in its products. We have a global supply chain and the COVID-19 pandemic and other health epidemics and outbreaks may adversely affect our ability to source components in a timely or cost effective manner from our third-party suppliers due to, among other things, work stoppages or interruptions. For example, our products depend on lasers and we currently consume a substantial portion of the available market. Any shortage of these lasers could materially and adversely affect our ability to manufacture our solutions. In addition, the lead times associated with certain components are lengthy and preclude rapid changes in quantities and delivery schedules. We have in the past experienced and may in the future experience component shortages and price fluctuations of certain key components and materials, and the predictability of the availability and pricing of these components may be limited. Component shortages or pricing fluctuations could be material in the future. In the event of a component shortage, supply interruption or material pricing change from suppliers of these components, we may not be able to develop alternate sources in a timely manner or at all in the case of sole or limited sources. Developing alternate sources of supply for these components may be time-consuming, difficult, and costly and we may not be able to source these components on terms that are acceptable to us, or at all, which may undermine our ability to meet our requirements or to fill customer orders in a timely manner. Any interruption or delay in the supply of any of these parts or components, or the inability to obtain these parts or components from alternate sources at acceptable prices and within a reasonable amount of time, would adversely affect our ability to meet our scheduled product deliveries to our customers. This could adversely affect our relationships with our customers and channel partners and could cause delays in shipment of our products and adversely affect our operating results. In addition, increased component costs could result in lower gross margins. Even where we are able to pass increased component costs along to our customers, there may be a lapse of time before we are able to do so such that we must absorb the increased cost. If we are unable to buy these components in quantities sufficient to meet our requirements on a timely basis, we will not be able to deliver products to our customers, which may result in such customers using competitive products instead of ours.
Because our sales have been primarily to customers making purchases for R&D projects and our orders are project-based, we expect our results of operations to fluctuate on a quarterly and annual basis, which could cause our stock price to fluctuate or decline.
Our quarterly results of operations have fluctuated in the past and may vary significantly in the future. As such, historical comparisons of our operating results may not be meaningful. In particular, because our sales to date have primarily been to customers making purchases for R&D, sales in any given quarter can fluctuate based on the timing and success of our customers’ development projects. Accordingly, the results of any one quarter should not be relied upon as an indication of future performance. Our quarterly financial results may fluctuate as a result of a variety of factors, many of which are outside of our control and may not fully reflect the underlying performance of our business. These fluctuations could adversely affect our ability to meet our expectations or those of securities analysts, ratings agencies or investors. If we do not meet these expectations for any period, the value of our business and our securities could decline significantly. Factors that may cause these quarterly fluctuations include, without limitation, those listed below:
•the timing and magnitude of orders and shipments of our products in any quarter;
•pricing changes we may adopt to drive market adoption or in response to competitive pressure;
•our ability to retain our existing customers and attract new customers;
•our ability to develop, introduce, manufacture and ship in a timely manner products that meet customer requirements;
•disruptions in our sales channels or termination of its relationship with important channel partners;
•delays in customers’ purchasing cycles or deferments of customers’ purchases in anticipation of new products or up-dates from us or our competitors;
•fluctuations in demand pressures for our products;
•the mix of products sold in any quarter;
•the duration of the global COVID-19 pandemic and the time it takes for economic recovery;
•the timing and rate of broader market adoption of autonomous systems utilizing our solutions across the automotive and other market sectors;
•market acceptance of lidar and further technological advancements by our competitors and other market participants;
•the ability of our customers to commercialize systems that incorporate our products;
•any change in the competitive dynamics of our markets, including consolidation of competitors, regulatory developments and new market entrants;
•our ability to effectively manage our inventory;
•changes in the source, cost, availability of and regulations pertaining to materials we use;
•adverse litigation, judgments, settlements or other litigation-related costs, or claims that may give rise to such costs; and
•general economic, industry and market conditions, including trade disputes.
Our transition to an outsourced manufacturing business model may not be successful, which could harm our ability to deliver products and recognize revenue.
We are in the initial stages of transitioning from a manufacturing model in which we primarily manufactured and assembled our products at our Orlando, Florida location, to one where we rely on third-party manufacturers in Mexico, California and potentially other foreign and domestic locations. We currently have an agreement with one such manufacturer of a key component and are in negotiations with other third parties to provide contract manufacturing of certain of our products. We believe the use of third-party manufacturers will have benefits, but in the near term, while we are beginning manufacturing with new partners, we may lose revenue, incur increased costs and potentially harm our customer relationships.
Reliance on third-party manufacturers reduces our control over the manufacturing process, including reduced control over quality, product costs and product supply and timing. We may experience delays in shipments or issues concerning product quality from our third-party manufacturers. If any of our third-party manufacturers experience interruptions, delays or disruptions in supplying our products, including by natural disasters, the global COVID-19 pandemic, other health epidemics and outbreaks, or work stoppages or capacity constraints, our ability to ship products to distributors and customers would be delayed. In addition, unfavorable economic conditions could result in financial distress among third-party manufacturers upon which we rely, thereby increasing the risk of disruption of supplies necessary to fulfill our production requirements and meet customer demands. Additionally, if any of our third-party manufacturers experience quality control problems in their manufacturing operations and our products do not meet customer or regulatory requirements, we could be required to cover the cost of repair or replacement of any defective products. These delays or product quality issues could have an immediate and material adverse effect on our ability to fulfill orders and could have a negative effect on our operating results. In addition, such delays or issues with product quality could adversely affect our reputation and our relationship with our channel partners. If third-party manufacturers experience financial, operational, manufacturing capacity or other difficulties, or experience shortages in required components, or if they are otherwise unable or unwilling to continue to manufacture our products in required volumes or at all, our supply may be disrupted, we may be required to seek alternate manufacturers and we may be required to re-design our products. It would be time-consuming, and could be costly and impracticable, to begin to use new manufacturers and designs, and such changes could cause significant interruptions in supply and could have an adverse effect on our ability to meet our scheduled product deliveries and may subsequently lead to the loss of sales. While we take measures to protect our trade secrets, the use of third-party manufacturers may also risk disclosure of our innovative and proprietary manufacturing methodologies, which could adversely affect our business.
If we commence international manufacturing operations, we may face risks associated with manufacturing operations outside the United States.
Manufacturing outside the United States is subject to several inherent risks, including:
•foreign currency fluctuations;
•local economic conditions;
•political instability;
•import or export requirements;
•foreign government regulatory requirements;
•reduced protection for intellectual property rights in some countries;
•tariffs and other trade barriers and restrictions; and
•potentially adverse tax consequences.
If we commence manufacturing operations outside the United States, we may be subject to these risks. Such risks could increase our costs and decrease our profit margins.
We, our outsourcing partners and our suppliers may rely on complex machinery for our production, which involves a significant degree of risk and uncertainty in terms of operational performance and costs.
We, our outsourcing partners and our suppliers may rely on complex machinery for the production, assembly and installation of our lidar solutions, which will involve a significant degree of uncertainty and risk in terms of operational performance and costs. Our production facilities and the facilities of our outsourcing partners and suppliers consist of large-scale machinery combining many components. These components may suffer unexpected malfunctions from time to time and will depend on repairs and spare parts to resume operations, which may not be available when needed. Unexpected malfunctions of these components may significantly affect the intended operational efficiency. Operational performance and costs can be difficult to predict and are often influenced by factors outside of our control, such as, but not limited to, scarcity of natural resources, environmental hazards and remediation, costs associated with decommissioning of machines, labor disputes and strikes, difficulty or delays in obtaining governmental permits, damages or defects in electronic systems, industrial accidents, fire, seismic activity and natural disasters. Should operational risks materialize, it may result in the personal injury to or death of workers, the loss of production equipment, damage to production facilities, monetary losses, delays and unanticipated fluctuations in production, environmental damage, administrative fines, increased insurance costs and potential legal liabilities, all which could have a material adverse effect on our business, prospects, financial condition or operating results.
As part of growing our business, we may make acquisitions. If we fail to successfully select, execute or integrate our acquisitions, then our business, results of operations and financial condition could be materially adversely affected, and our stock price could decline.
From time to time, we may undertake acquisitions to add new products and technologies, acquire talent, gain new sales channels or enter into new markets or sales territories. In addition to possible stockholder approval, we may need approvals and licenses from relevant government authorities for the acquisitions and to comply with any applicable laws and regulations, which could result in increased delay and costs, and may disrupt our business strategy if we fail to do so. Furthermore, acquisitions and the subsequent integration of new assets, businesses, key personnel, customers, vendors and suppliers require significant attention from our management and could result in a diversion of resources from our existing business, which in turn could have an adverse effect on our operations. Acquired assets or businesses may not generate the financial results we expect. Acquisitions could result in the use of substantial amounts of cash, potentially dilutive issuances of equity securities, the occurrence of significant goodwill impairment charges, amortization expenses for other intangible assets and exposure to potential unknown liabilities of the acquired business. Moreover, the costs of identifying and consummating acquisitions may be significant.
To date, we have limited experience with acquisitions and the integration of acquired technology and personnel. Failure to successfully identify, complete, manage and integrate acquisitions could materially and adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations and could cause our stock price to decline.
Our sales and operations in international markets expose us to operational, financial and regulatory risks.
International sales comprise a significant amount of our overall revenue. Sales to international customers accounted for 71% and 17% of our revenue in 2020 and 2019, respectively. We are committed to growing our international sales. While we have committed resources, and are working closely with OEMs and other collaborators outside the United States, to expand our
international operations and sales channels, these efforts may not be successful. International operations are subject to a number of other risks, including:
•exchange rate fluctuations;
•political and economic instability, international terrorism and anti-American sentiment, particularly in emerging markets;
•global or regional health crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic or other health epidemics and outbreaks;
•potential for violations of anti-corruption laws and regulations, such as those related to bribery and fraud;
•preference for locally branded products, and laws and business practices favoring local competition;
•potential consequences of, and uncertainty related to, the “Brexit” process in the United Kingdom, which could lead to additional expense and complexity in doing business there;
•increased difficulty in managing inventory;
•delayed revenue recognition;
•less effective protection of intellectual property;
•stringent regulation of the autonomous or other systems or products using our products and stringent consumer protection and product compliance regulations, including but not limited to General Data Protection Regulation in the European Union, European competition law, the Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive, the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive and the European Ecodesign Directive that are costly to comply with and may vary from country to country;
•difficulties and costs of staffing and managing foreign operations;
•import and export laws and the impact of tariffs;
•changes in local tax and customs duty laws or changes in the enforcement, application or interpretation of such laws; and
•U.S. government’s restrictions on certain technology transfer to certain countries of concern.
The occurrence of any of these risks could negatively affect our international business and consequently our business, operating results and financial condition.
Any failure to grow our relationship with SAIC and our proposed international expansion into China could expose us to substantial business, regulatory, political, financial and economic risks.
We have entered into a relationship with SAIC Motor Corporation Limited pursuant to which we plan to establish a presence in China to support the collaboration between the parties and enable series production of autonomous vehicles utilizing our technology in 2022. Any failure in our ability to grow our relationship with SAIC or to realize the anticipated benefits of our relationship with SAIC could harm our brand, prospects, financial condition and operating results and have an adverse effect on our business. Our proposed expansion into China could also expose us to substantial risks associated with doing business in China, such as, taxation, inflation, manufacturing, environmental and other regulations, foreign currency exchange rates, political risks, the labor market and property and financial regulations. Additionally, we would need to maintain compliance with the market’s ongoing development of standards to define deployment requirements for higher levels of autonomy. Our ability to operate in China may be adversely affected by changes in, or our failure to comply with, Chinese laws, regulations and standards. As we hire personnel to maintain our operations in China, we would also be exposed to risks associated with any changes to the employment and labor laws in China, which could increase our operating costs in China. There is also significant uncertainty about the future relationship between the United States and China with respect to political risks, including but not limited to, trade policies, treaties, government regulations and tariffs.
The complexity of our products could result in unforeseen delays or expenses from undetected defects, errors or reliability issues in hardware or software which could reduce the market adoption of our new products, damage our reputation with current or prospective customers, expose us to product liability and other claims and adversely affect our operating costs.
Our products are highly technical and very complex and require high standards to manufacture and have in the past and will likely in the future experience defects, errors or reliability issues at various stages of development. We may be unable to timely release new products, manufacture existing products, correct problems that have arisen or correct such problems to our customers’ satisfaction. Additionally, undetected errors, defects or security vulnerabilities, especially as new products are introduced or as new versions are released, could result in serious injury to the end users of technology incorporating our
products, or those in the surrounding area, our customers never being able to commercialize technology incorporating our products, litigation against us, negative publicity and other consequences. These risks are particularly prevalent in the highly competitive autonomous driving and ADAS markets. Some errors or defects in our products may only be discovered after they have been tested, commercialized and deployed by customers. If that is the case, we may incur significant additional development costs and product recall, repair or replacement costs. These problems may also result in claims, including class actions, against us by our customers or others. Our reputation or brand may be damaged as a result of these problems and customers may be reluctant to buy our products, which could adversely affect our ability to retain existing customers and attract new customers and could adversely affect our financial results.
In addition, we could face material legal claims for breach of contract, product liability, fraud, tort or breach of warranty as a result of these problems. Defending a lawsuit, regardless of its merit, could be costly and may divert management’s attention and adversely affect the market’s perception of us and our products. In addition, our business liability insurance coverage could prove inadequate with respect to a claim and future coverage may be unavailable on acceptable terms or at all. These product-related issues could result in claims against us and our business could be adversely affected.
We may be subject to product liability or warranty claims that could result in significant direct or indirect costs, which could adversely affect our business and operating results.
Our customers use our solutions in autonomous driving and ADAS applications, which present the risk of significant injury, including fatalities. We may be subject to claims if a product using our lidar technology is involved in an accident and persons are injured or purport to be injured. Any insurance that we carry may not be sufficient or it may not apply to all situations. Similarly, our customers could be subjected to claims as a result of such accidents and bring legal claims against us to attempt to hold us liable. In addition, if lawmakers or governmental agencies were to determine that the use of our products or autonomous driving or certain ADAS applications increased the risk of injury to all or a subset of our customers, they may pass laws or adopt regulations that limit the use of our products or increase our liability associated with the use of our products or that regulate the use of or delay the deployment of autonomous driving and ADAS technology. Any of these events could adversely affect our brand, relationships with customers, operating results or financial condition.
We typically provide a limited-time warranty on our products. The occurrence of any material defects in our products could make us liable for damages and warranty claims. In addition, we could incur significant costs to correct any defects, warranty claims or other problems, including costs related to product recalls. Any negative publicity related to the perceived quality of our products could affect our brand image, partner and customer demand, and adversely affect our operating results and financial condition. Also, warranty, recall and product liability claims may result in litigation, including class actions, the occurrence of which could be costly, lengthy and distracting and adversely affect our business and operating results.
If we do not maintain sufficient inventory or if we do not adequately manage our inventory, we could lose sales or incur higher inventory-related expenses, which could negatively affect our operating results.
To ensure adequate inventory supply, we must forecast inventory needs and expenses, place orders sufficiently in advance with our suppliers and manufacturing partners and manufacture products based on our estimates of future demand for particular products. Fluctuations in the adoption of lidar products may affect our ability to forecast our future operating results, including revenue, gross margins, cash flows and profitability. Our ability to accurately forecast demand for our products could be affected by many factors, including the rapidly changing nature of the autonomous driving and ADAS markets in which we operate, the uncertainty surrounding the market acceptance and commercialization of lidar technology, the emergence of new markets, an increase or decrease in customer demand for our products or for products and services of our competitors, product introductions by competitors, the COVID-19 pandemic, other health epidemics and outbreaks, and any associated work stoppages or interruptions, unanticipated changes in general market conditions and the weakening of economic conditions or consumer confidence in future economic conditions. If our lidar products are commercialized in autonomous driving and ADAS applications, both of which are experiencing rapid growth in demand, we may face challenges acquiring adequate supplies to manufacture our products and/or we and our manufacturing partners may not be able to manufacture our products at a rate necessary to satisfy the levels of demand, which would negatively affect our revenue. This risk may be exacerbated by the fact that we may not carry or be able to obtain for our manufacturers a significant amount of inventory to satisfy short-term demand increases. If we fail to accurately forecast customer demand, we may experience excess inventory levels or a shortage of products available for sale.
Inventory levels in excess of customer demand may result in inventory write-downs or write-offs and the sale of excess inventory at discounted prices, which would adversely affect our financial results, including our gross margin, and have a negative effect on our brand. Conversely, if we underestimate customer demand for our products, we, or our manufacturing partners, may not be able to deliver products to meet our requirements, and this could result in damage to our brand and customer relationships and adversely affect our revenue and operating results.
The average selling prices of our products could decrease rapidly over the life of the product, which may negatively affect our revenue and gross margin.
We may experience declines in the average selling prices of our products generally as our customers seek to commercialize autonomous systems at prices low enough to achieve market acceptance. In order to sell products that have a falling average unit selling price and maintain margins at the same time, we will need to continually reduce product and manufacturing costs. To manage manufacturing costs, we must engineer the most cost-effective design for our products. In addition, we continuously drive initiatives to reduce labor cost, improve worker efficiency, reduce the cost of materials, use fewer materials and further lower overall product costs by carefully managing component prices, inventory and shipping cost. We also need to continually introduce new products with higher sales prices and gross margin in order to maintain our overall gross margin. If we are unable to manage the cost of older products or successfully introduce new products with higher gross margin, our revenue and overall gross margin would likely decline.
Adverse conditions in the automotive industry or the global economy more generally could have adverse effects on our results of operations.
While we make our strategic planning decisions based on the assumption that the markets we are targeting will grow, our business is dependent, in large part on, and directly affected by, business cycles and other factors affecting the global automobile industry and global economy generally. Automotive production and sales are highly cyclical and depend on general economic conditions and other factors, including consumer spending and preferences, changes in interest rates and credit availability, consumer confidence, fuel costs, fuel availability, environmental impact, governmental incentives and regulatory requirements, and political volatility, especially in energy-producing countries and growth markets. In addition, automotive production and sales can be affected by our automotive OEM customers’ ability to continue operating in response to challenging economic conditions and in response to labor relations issues, regulatory requirements, trade agreements and other factors. The volume of automotive production in North America, Europe and the rest of the world has fluctuated, sometimes significantly, from year to year, and we expect such fluctuations to give rise to fluctuations in the demand for our products. Any significant adverse change in any of these factors may result in a reduction in automotive sales and production by our automotive OEM customers and could have a material adverse effect on our business, results of operations and financial condition.
The discontinuation, lack of commercial success, or loss of business with respect to a particular vehicle model or technology package for which we are a significant supplier could reduce our sales and adversely affect our profitability.
If we are able to secure design wins and our solutions are included in these autonomous driving and ADAS products, we expect to enter into supply agreements with the relevant customer. Market practice dictates that these supply agreements typically require us to supply a customer’s requirements for a particular vehicle model or autonomous driving or ADAS product, rather than supply a set number of products. These contracts can have short terms and/or can be subject to renegotiation, sometimes as frequently as annually, all of which may affect product pricing, and may be terminated by our customers at any time. Therefore, even if we are successful in obtaining design wins and the systems into which our products are built are commercialized, the discontinuation of, the loss of business with respect to, or a lack of commercial success of a particular vehicle model or technology package for which we are a significant supplier could mean that the expected sales of our products will not materialize, materially and adversely affecting our business.
Since many of the markets in which we compete are new and rapidly evolving, it is difficult to forecast long-term end-customer adoption rates and demand for our products.
We are pursuing opportunities in markets that are undergoing rapid changes, including technological and regulatory changes, and it is difficult to predict the timing and size of the opportunities. For example, autonomous driving and lidar-based ADAS applications require complex technology. Because these automotive systems depend on technology from many companies, commercialization of autonomous driving or ADAS products could be delayed or impaired on account of certain technological components of our or others not being ready to be deployed in vehicles. Although we currently have contracts with over 50 commercial partners, these companies may not be able to commercialize our technology immediately, or at all. Regulatory, safety or reliability developments, many of which are outside of our control, could also cause delays or otherwise impair commercial adoption of these new technologies, which will adversely affect our growth. Our future financial performance will depend on our ability to make timely investments in the correct market opportunities. If one or more of these markets experience a shift in customer or prospective customer demand, our products may not compete as effectively, if at all, and they may not be designed into commercialized products. Given the evolving nature of the markets in which we operate, it is difficult to predict customer demand or adoption rates for our products or the future growth of the markets in which we operate. As a result, the financial projections in this Annual Report necessarily reflect various estimates and assumptions that may not prove accurate and these projections could differ materially from actual results due to the risks included in this “Risk Factors” section, among others. If demand does not develop or if we cannot accurately forecast customer demand, the size of
our markets, inventory requirements or our future financial results, our business, results of operations and financial condition will be adversely affected.
We currently have and target many customers that are large corporations with substantial negotiating power, exacting product standards and potentially competitive internal solutions. If we are unable to sell our products to these customers, our prospects and results of operations will be adversely affected.
Many of our customers and potential customers are large, multinational corporations with substantial negotiating power relative to us and, in some instances, may have internal solutions that are competitive to our products. These large, multinational corporations also have significant development resources, which may allow them to acquire or develop independently, or in partnership with others, competitive technologies. Meeting the technical requirements and securing design wins with any of these companies will require a substantial investment of our time and resources. We cannot assure you that our products will secure design wins from these or other companies or that we will generate meaningful revenue from the sales of our products to these key potential customers. If our products are not selected by these large corporations or if these corporations develop or acquire competitive technology, it will have an adverse effect on our business.
Our business could be materially and adversely affected if we lost any of our largest customers or if we were unable to pay our invoices.
Although we have and continue to pursue a broad customer base, we are dependent on a collection of large customers with strong purchasing power. In 2020 and 2019, our top 10 customers represented 94% and 79% of our revenue, respectively. In 2020, Volvo and in 2019, Volvo, Toyota and Northrop Grumman accounted for more than 10% of our annual revenue. The loss of business from any of our major customers (whether by lower overall demand for our products, cancellation of existing contracts or product orders or the failure to design in our products or award us new business) could have a material adverse effect on our business.
To the extent autonomous vehicle and ADAS systems become accepted by major automotive OEMs, we expect that we will rely increasingly for our revenue on Tier 1 suppliers through which automotive OEMs procure components. We expect that these Tier 1 suppliers will be responsible for certain hardpoint and software configuration activities specific to each OEM, and they may not exclusively carry our solutions.
There is also a risk that one or more of our major customers could be unable to pay our invoices as they become due or that a customer will simply refuse to make such payments if it experiences financial difficulties. If a major customer were to enter into bankruptcy proceedings or similar proceedings whereby contractual commitments are subject to stay of execution and the possibility of legal or other modification, we could be forced to record a substantial loss.
We are substantially dependent on our partnership with Volvo, and our business could be materially and adversely affected if our partnership with Volvo were terminated.
Our business is substantially dependent on our partnership with Volvo. For the years ended December 31, 2020 and 2019, Volvo accounted for $8.9 million, or 64% and $0.6 million, or 4.7%, respectively, of our total revenue. There can be no assurance that we will be able to maintain our relationship with Volvo and secure orders for our products. If we are unable to maintain our relationship with Volvo, or if our arrangement is modified so that the economic terms become less favorable to us, then our business would be materially adversely affected.
If we are unable to establish and maintain confidence in our long-term business prospects among customers and analysts and within our industry or are subject to negative publicity, then our financial condition, operating results, business prospects and access to capital may suffer materially.
Customers may be less likely to purchase our lidar solutions if they are not convinced that our business will succeed or that our service and support and other operations will continue in the long term.
Similarly, suppliers and other third parties will be less likely to invest time and resources in developing business relationships with us if they are not convinced that our business will succeed. Accordingly, in order to build and maintain our business, we must maintain confidence among customers, suppliers, analysts, ratings agencies and other parties in our products, long-term financial viability and business prospects. Maintaining such confidence may be particularly complicated by certain factors including those that are largely outside of our control, such as our limited operating history, customer unfamiliarity with our lidar solutions, any delays in scaling production, delivery and service operations to meet demand, competition and uncertainty regarding the future of autonomous vehicles or our other services and our production and sales performance compared with market expectations.
Our investments in educating our customers and potential customers about the advantages of lidar and its applications may not result in sales of our products.
Educating our prospective customers, and to a lesser extent, our existing customers, about lidar, its advantages over other sensing technologies and lidar’s ability to convey value in different industries and deployments is an integral part of developing new business and the lidar market generally. If prospective customers have a negative perception of, or experience with, lidar or a competitor’s lidar products they may be reluctant to adopt lidar in general or specifically our products. Adverse statements about lidar by influential market participants may also deter adoption. Some of our competitors have significant financial or marketing resources that may allow them to engage in public marketing campaigns about their alternative technology, lidar or our solutions. Our efforts to educate potential customers and the market generally and to counter any adverse statements made by competitors or other market participants will require significant financial and personnel resources. These educational efforts may not be successful and we may not offset the costs of such efforts with revenue from the new customers. If we are unable to acquire new customers to offset these expenses or if the market accepts such adverse statements, our financial condition will be adversely affected.
The period of time from a design win to implementation is long and we are subject to the risks of cancellation or postponement of the contract or unsuccessful implementation.
Prospective customers, including those in the automotive industry, generally must make significant commitments of resources to test and validate our products and confirm that they can integrate with other technologies before including them in any particular system, product or model. The development cycles of our products with new customers varies widely depending on the application, market, customer and the complexity of the product. In the automotive market, for example, this development cycle can be five to seven or more years. The development cycle in certain other markets can be months to one or two years. These development cycles result in us investing our resources prior to realizing any revenue from the commercialization. Further, we are subject to the risk that customers cancel or postpone implementation of our technology, as well as that we will not be able to integrate our technology successfully into a larger system with other sensing modalities. Further, our revenue could be less than forecasted if the system, product or vehicle model that includes our lidar products is unsuccessful, including for reasons unrelated to our technology. Long development cycles and product cancellations or postponements may adversely affect our business, results of operations and financial condition.
We operate in a highly competitive market and some market participants have substantially greater resources. We compete against a large number of both established competitors and new market entrants.
The markets for sensing technology applicable to autonomous solutions in the automobile industry are highly competitive. Our future success will depend on our ability to remain a leader in our targeted markets by continuing to develop and protect from infringement advanced lidar technology in a timely manner and to stay ahead of existing and new competitors. Our competitors are numerous and they compete with us directly by offering lidar products and indirectly by attempting to solve some of the same challenges with different technology. We face competition from camera and radar companies, other developers of lidar products, Tier 1 suppliers and other technology and automotive supply companies, some of which have significantly greater resources than we do. In the automotive market, our competitors have commercialized both lidar and non-lidar-based ADAS technology that has achieved market adoption, strong brand recognition and may continue to improve. Other competitors are working towards commercializing autonomous driving technology and either by themselves, or with a publicly announced partner, have substantial financial, marketing, R&D and other resources. Some of our customers in the autonomous vehicle and ADAS markets have announced development efforts or made acquisitions directed at creating their own lidar-based or other sensing technologies, which would compete with our solutions. We do not know how close these competitors are to commercializing autonomous driving systems or novel ADAS applications. In markets outside of the automotive industry, our competitors, like us, seek to develop new sensing applications across industries. Even in these emerging markets, we face substantial competition from numerous competitors seeking to prove the value of their technology.
Additionally, increased competition may result in pricing pressure and reduced margins and may impede our ability to increase the sales of our products or cause us to lose market share, any of which will adversely affect our business, results of operations and financial condition.
The markets in which we compete are characterized by rapid technological change, which requires us to continue to develop new products and product innovations and could adversely affect market adoption of our products.
While we intend to invest substantial resources to remain on the forefront of technological development, continuing technological changes in sensing technology, lidar and the markets for these products, including the ADAS and autonomous driving industries, could adversely affect adoption of lidar and/or our products, either generally or for particular applications. Our future success will depend upon our ability to develop and introduce a variety of new capabilities and innovations to our existing product offerings, as well as introduce a variety of new product offerings, to address the changing needs of the markets in which we offer our products. For example, we are currently working on developing perception software products. We cannot
guarantee that such software or other new products will be released in a timely manner, or at all, or achieve market acceptance. Delays in delivering new products that meet customer requirements could damage our relationships with customers and lead them to seek alternative sources of supply. In addition, our success to date has been based on the delivery of our solutions to R&D programs in which developers are investing substantial capital to develop new systems. Our continued success relies on the success of the R&D phase of these customers as they expand into commercialized projects. As autonomous technology reaches the stage of large-scale commercialization, we will be required to develop and deliver solutions at price points that enable wider and ultimately mass-market adoption. Delays in introducing products and innovations, the failure to choose correctly among technical alternatives or the failure to offer innovative products or configurations at competitive prices may cause existing and potential customers to purchase our competitors’ products or turn to alternative sensing technology.
If we are unable to devote adequate resources to develop products or cannot otherwise successfully develop products or system configurations that meet customer requirements on a timely basis or that remain competitive with technological alternatives, our products could lose market share, our revenue will decline, we may experience operating losses and our business and prospects will be adversely affected.
Developments in alternative technology may adversely affect the demand for our lidar technology.
Significant developments in alternative technologies, such as cameras and radar, may materially and adversely affect our business, prospects, financial condition and operating results in ways we do not currently anticipate. Existing and other camera and radar technologies may emerge as customers’ preferred alternative to our solutions. Any failure by us to develop new or enhanced technologies or processes, or to react to changes in existing technologies, could materially delay our development and introduction of new and enhanced products in the autonomous vehicle industry, which could result in the loss of competitiveness of our lidar solutions, decreased revenue and a loss of market share to competitors. Our R&D efforts may not be sufficient to adapt to changes in technology. As technologies change, we plan to upgrade or adapt our lidar solutions with the latest technology. However, our solutions may not compete effectively with alternative systems if we are not able to source and integrate the latest technology into our existing lidar solutions.
Because lidar is new in most of the markets we are seeking to enter, forecasts of market growth in this Annual Report may not be accurate.
Market opportunity estimates and growth forecasts included in this Annual Report are subject to significant uncertainty and are based on assumptions and estimates that may not prove to be accurate. The forecasts and estimates in this Annual Report relating to the expected size and growth of the markets for lidar-based technology may prove to be inaccurate. Even if these markets experience the forecasted growth described in this Annual Report, we may not grow our business at similar rates, or at all. Our future growth is subject to many factors, including market adoption of our products, which is subject to many risks and uncertainties. Accordingly, the forecasts and estimates of market size and growth described in this Annual Report, including our estimates that the size of our total addressable market is expected to grow from approximately $5 billion currently to $150 billion by 2030, should not be taken as indicative of our future growth. In addition, these forecasts do not take into account the impact of the current global COVID-19 pandemic, and we cannot assure you that these forecasts will not be materially and adversely affected as a result.
We may need to raise additional capital in the future in order to execute our business plan, which may not be available on terms acceptable to us, or at all.
In the future, we may require additional capital to respond to technological advancements, competitive dynamics or technologies, customer demands, business opportunities, challenges, acquisitions or unforeseen circumstances and we may determine to engage in equity or debt financings or enter into credit facilities for other reasons. In order to further business relationships with current or potential customers or partners, we may issue equity or equity-linked securities to such current or potential customers or partners. We may not be able to timely secure additional debt or equity financing on favorable terms, or at all. If we raise additional funds through the issuance of equity or convertible debt or other equity-linked securities or if we issue equity or equity-linked securities to current or potential customers to further business relationships, our existing stockholders could experience significant dilution. Any debt financing obtained by us in the future could involve restrictive covenants relating to our capital raising activities and other financial and operational matters, which may make it more difficult for us to obtain additional capital and to pursue business opportunities, including potential acquisitions. If we are unable to obtain adequate financing or financing on terms satisfactory to us, when we require it, our ability to continue to grow or support our business and to respond to business challenges could be significantly limited.
We have identified material weaknesses in our internal control over financial reporting as of December 31, 2020 and 2019. If we are unable to develop and maintain an effective system of internal control over financial reporting, we may not be able to accurately report our financial results in a timely manner, which may adversely affect investor confidence in us and materially and adversely affect our business and operating results.
We are subject to the reporting requirements of the Exchange Act, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the rules and regulations of Nasdaq. We expect that the requirements of these rules and regulations will continue to increase our legal, accounting and financial compliance costs and place significant strain on our personnel, systems and resources.
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act requires, among other things, that we maintain effective disclosure controls and procedures and internal control over financial reporting. We are continuing to develop and refine our disclosure controls, internal control over financial reporting and other procedures that are designed to ensure that information required to be disclosed by us in the reports that we will file with the SEC is recorded, processed, summarized and reported within the time periods specified in SEC rules and forms, and that information required to be disclosed in reports under the Exchange Act is accumulated and communicated to our principal executive and financial officers.
Any failure to implement and maintain effective internal controls could increase our operating costs and could materially and adversely affect our business and operating results.
In connection with our financial statement close process for the years ended December 31, 2020 and 2019, we identified a material weakness in the design and operating effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting. The material weakness we identified resulted from a lack of sufficient number of qualified personnel within our accounting function who possessed an appropriate level of expertise to effectively perform the following functions:
•identify, select and apply GAAP sufficiently to provide reasonable assurance that transactions were being appropriately recorded; and
•assess risk and design appropriate control activities over information technology systems and financial and reporting processes necessary to provide reasonable assurance regarding the reliability of financial reporting and the preparation of financial statements.
A material weakness is a deficiency or combination of deficiencies in internal control over financial reporting such that there is a reasonable possibility that a material misstatement of our financial statements would not be prevented or detected on a timely basis. These deficiencies could result in additional material misstatements to our consolidated financial statements that could not be prevented or detected on a timely basis.
Our management is in the process of developing a remediation plan which shall include, without limitation, the hiring of additional accounting and finance personnel with technical public company accounting and financial reporting experience. The material weaknesses will not be considered remediated until management designs and implements effective controls that operate for a sufficient period of time and management has concluded, through testing, that these controls are effective. Our management will monitor the effectiveness of our remediation plans and will make changes management determines to be appropriate.
If not remediated, these material weaknesses could result in material misstatements to our annual or interim consolidated financial statements that might not be prevented or detected on a timely basis, or in delayed filing of required periodic reports. If we are unable to assert that our internal control over financial reporting is effective, or when required in the future, if our independent registered public accounting firm is unable to express an unqualified opinion as to the effectiveness of the internal control over financial reporting, investors may lose confidence in the accuracy and completeness of our financial reports, the market price of the Common Stock could be adversely affected and we could become subject to litigation or investigations by Nasdaq, the SEC, or other regulatory authorities, which could require additional financial and management resources.
Further, additional weaknesses in our internal controls may be discovered in the future. Any failure to develop or maintain effective controls, or any difficulties encountered in our implementation or improvement, could adversely affect our operating results or cause us to fail to meet our reporting obligations and may result in a restatement of our financial statements for prior periods.
Our independent registered public accounting firm is not required to formally attest to the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting until after we are no longer an emerging growth company. At such time, our independent registered public accounting firm may issue a report that is adverse in the event it is not satisfied with the level at which our controls are documented, designed or operating.
Changes in tax laws or exposure to additional income tax liabilities could affect our future profitability.
Factors that could materially affect our future effective tax rates include but are not limited to:
•changes in tax laws or the regulatory environment;
•changes in accounting and tax standards or practices;
•changes in the composition of operating income by tax jurisdiction; and
•our operating results before taxes.
Because we do not have a long history of operating at our present scale and we have significant expansion plans, our effective tax rate may fluctuate in the future. Future effective tax rates could be affected by operating losses in jurisdictions where no tax benefit can be recorded under GAAP, changes in the composition of earnings in countries with differing tax rates, changes in deferred tax assets and liabilities, or changes in tax laws.
On December 22, 2017, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (the “Tax Act”) was signed into law making significant changes to the U.S. Tax Code. In particular, sweeping changes were made to the U.S. taxation of foreign operations. Changes include, but are not limited to, a reduction to the corporate income tax rate, limiting interest deductions, adopting elements of a territorial tax system, assessing a repatriation tax or “toll-charge” on undistributed earnings and profits of U.S.-owned foreign corporations, and introducing certain anti-base erosion provisions, including a new minimum tax on global intangible low-taxed income (“GILTI”) and base erosion and anti-abuse tax (“BEAT”). The new legislation had no effect on our provision for income taxes for 2020 and 2019, because we generated net tax losses and offset our deferred tax assets on the balance sheet with a full valuation allowance due to our current loss position and forecasted losses for the near future. The overall impact of this tax reform is uncertain, and our business and financial condition, including with respect to our non-U.S. operations, could be adversely affected.
In addition to the impact of the Tax Act on our federal taxes, the Tax Act may impact our taxation in other jurisdictions, including with respect to state income taxes. State legislatures have not had sufficient time to respond to the Tax Act. Accordingly, there is uncertainty as to how the laws will apply in the various state jurisdictions. Additionally, other foreign governing bodies may enact changes to their tax laws in reaction to the Tax Act that could result in changes to our global tax position and materially adversely affect our business, results of operations and financial condition. Additionally, the Internal Revenue Service, (the “IRS”) and several foreign tax authorities have increasingly focused attention on intercompany transfer pricing with respect to sales of products and services and the use of intangibles. Tax authorities could disagree with our future intercompany charges, cross-jurisdictional transfer pricing or other matters and assess additional taxes. If we do not prevail in any such disagreements, our profitability may be affected.
Our ability to use our net operating loss carryforwards and certain other tax attributes may be limited.
As of December 31, 2020, we had $241.6 million of U.S. federal and $240.0 million of state net operating loss carryforwards available to reduce future taxable income. Of the $241.6 million in U.S. federal operating loss carryforwards, $198.9 million will be carried forward indefinitely for U.S. federal tax purposes and $42.7 million will expire between 2035 and 2037. The $240.0 million of our U.S. state net operating loss carryforwards will expire between 2035 and 2037. It is possible that we will not generate taxable income in time to use these net operating loss carryforwards before their expiration or at all. Under legislative changes made in December 2017, U.S. federal net operating losses incurred in 2018 and in future years may be carried forward indefinitely, but the deductibility of such net operating losses is limited. It is uncertain if and to what extent various states will conform to the newly enacted federal tax law. In addition, the federal and state net operating loss carryforwards and certain tax credits may be subject to significant limitations under Section 382 and Section 383 of the U.S. Tax Code, respectively, and similar provisions of state law. Under those sections of the U.S. Tax Code, if a corporation undergoes an “ownership change,” the corporation’s ability to use its pre-change net operating loss carryforwards and other pre-change attributes, such as research tax credits, to offset its post-change income or tax may be limited. In general, an “ownership change” will occur if there is a cumulative change in our ownership by “5-percent shareholders” that exceeds 50 percentage points over a rolling three-year period. Similar rules may apply under state tax laws. We have not yet undertaken an analysis of whether the Business Combination constitutes an “ownership change” for purposes of Section 382 and Section 383 of the U.S. Tax Code.
We are highly dependent on the services of Austin Russell, our Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer.
We are highly dependent on Austin Russell, our Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer. Mr. Russell created our first lidar product and he remains deeply involved in all aspects of our business, including product development. The loss of Mr. Russell would adversely affect our business because his loss could make it more difficult to, among other things, compete with other market participants, manage our R&D activities and retain existing customers or cultivate new ones. Negative public perception of, or negative news related to, Mr. Russell may adversely affect our brand, relationship with customers or standing in the industry.
Our business depends substantially on the efforts of our executive officers and highly skilled personnel, and our operations may be severely disrupted if we lost their services.
Competition for highly-skilled personnel is often intense, especially in Orlando, Florida and the San Francisco Bay Area, where two of our offices are located, and we may incur significant costs to attract highly-skilled personnel. We may not be successful in attracting, integrating, or retaining qualified personnel to fulfill our current or future needs. We have, from time to time, experienced, and we expect to continue to experience, difficulty in hiring and retaining highly skilled employees with appropriate qualifications. In addition, job candidates and existing employees often consider the value of the equity awards they receive in connection with their employment. If the perceived value of our equity or equity awards declines, it may adversely affect our ability to retain highly skilled employees. If we fail to attract new personnel or fail to retain and motivate our current personnel, our business and future growth prospects could be adversely affected.
Our business could be materially and adversely affected by the current global COVID-19 pandemic or other health epidemics and outbreaks.
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic as well as other possible health epidemics and outbreaks could result in a material adverse impact on our or our customers’ business operations including reduction or suspension of operations in the U.S. or certain parts of the world. Our engineering and manufacturing operations, among others, cannot all be conducted in a remote working structure and often require on-site access to materials and equipment. We have customers with international operations in varying industries. We also depend on suppliers and manufacturers worldwide. Depending upon the duration of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the associated business interruptions, our customers, suppliers, manufacturers and partners may suspend or delay their engagement with us, which could result in a material adverse effect on our financial condition. Our response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic may prove to be inadequate and we may be unable to continue our operations in the manner we had prior to the outbreak, and may endure interruptions, reputational harm, delays in our product development and shipments, all of which could have an adverse effect on our business, operating results, and financial condition. In addition, when the pandemic subsides, we cannot assure you as to the timing of any economic recovery, which could continue to have a material adverse effect on our target markets and our business.
Our business is subject to the risks of earthquakes, fire, floods and other natural catastrophic events, global pandemics, and interruptions by man-made problems, such as terrorism. Material disruptions of our business or information systems resulting from these events could adversely affect our operating results.
A significant natural disaster, such as an earthquake, fire, flood, hurricane or significant power outage or other similar events, such as infectious disease outbreaks or pandemic events, including the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, could have an adverse effect on our business and operating results. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic may have the effect of heightening many of the other risks described in this “Risk Factors” section, such as the demand for our products, our ability to achieve or maintain profitability and our ability to raise additional capital in the future. Our corporate headquarters and R&D and manufacturing base are located in Florida, which currently has a high number of COVID-19 pandemic cases. One of our offices is located in the San Francisco Bay Area, a region known for seismic activity. In addition, natural disasters, acts of terrorism or war could cause disruptions in our remaining manufacturing operations, our or our customers’ or channel partners’ businesses, our suppliers’ or the economy as a whole. We also rely on information technology systems to communicate among our workforce and with third parties. Any disruption to our communications, whether caused by a natural disaster or by man made problems, such as power disruptions, could adversely affect our business. We do not have a formal disaster recovery plan or policy in place and do not currently require that our suppliers’ partners have such plans or policies in place. To the extent that any such disruptions result in delays or cancellations of orders or impede our suppliers’ ability to timely deliver product components, or the deployment of our products, our business, operating results and financial condition would be adversely affected.
Interruption or failure of our information technology and communications systems could impact our ability to effectively provide our services.
We plan to include in-vehicle services and functionality that utilize data connectivity to monitor performance and timely capture opportunities to enhance performance and functionality. The availability and effectiveness of our services depend on the continued operation of information technology and communications systems. Our systems will be vulnerable to damage or
interruption from, among others, physical theft, fire, terrorist attacks, natural disasters, power loss, war, telecommunications failures, viruses, denial or degradation of service attacks, ransomware, social engineering schemes, insider theft or misuse or other attempts to harm our systems. We utilize reputable third-party service providers or vendors for all of our data other than our source code, and these providers could also be vulnerable to harms similar to those that could damage our systems, including sabotage and intentional acts of vandalism causing potential disruptions. Some of our systems will not be fully redundant, and our disaster recovery planning cannot account for all eventualities. Any problems with our third-party cloud hosting providers could result in lengthy interruptions in our business. In addition, our in-vehicle services and functionality are highly technical and complex technology which may contain errors or vulnerabilities that could result in interruptions in our business or the failure of our systems.
We are subject to cybersecurity risks to operational systems, security systems, infrastructure, integrated software in our lidar solutions and customer data processed by us or third-party vendors or suppliers and any material failure, weakness, interruption, cyber event, incident or breach of security could prevent us from effectively operating our business.
We are at risk for interruptions, outages and breaches of: operational systems, including business, financial, accounting, product development, data processing or production processes, owned by us or our third-party vendors or suppliers; facility security systems, owned by us or our third-party vendors or suppliers; in-product technology owned by us or our third-party vendors or suppliers; the integrated software in our lidar solutions; or customer or driver data that we process or our third-party vendors or suppliers process on our behalf. Such cyber incidents could materially disrupt operational systems; result in loss of intellectual property, trade secrets or other proprietary or competitively sensitive information; compromise certain information of customers, employees, suppliers, drivers or others; jeopardize the security of our facilities; or affect the performance of in-product technology and the integrated software in our lidar solutions. A cyber incident could be caused by disasters, insiders (through inadvertence or with malicious intent) or malicious third parties (including nation-states or nation-state supported actors) using sophisticated, targeted methods to circumvent firewalls, encryption and other security defenses, including hacking, fraud, trickery or other forms of deception. The techniques used by cyber attackers change frequently and may be difficult to detect for long periods of time. Although we maintain information technology measures designed to protect us against intellectual property theft, data breaches and other cyber incidents, such measures will require updates and improvements, and we cannot guarantee that such measures will be adequate to detect, prevent or mitigate cyber incidents. The implementation, maintenance, segregation and improvement of these systems requires significant management time, support and cost. Moreover, there are inherent risks associated with developing, improving, expanding and updating current systems, including the disruption of our data management, procurement, production execution, finance, supply chain and sales and service processes. These risks may affect our ability to manage our data and inventory, procure parts or supplies or produce, sell, deliver and service our solutions, adequately protect our intellectual property or achieve and maintain compliance with, or realize available benefits under, applicable laws, regulations and contracts. We cannot be sure that the systems upon which we rely, including those of our third-party vendors or suppliers, will be effectively implemented, maintained or expanded as planned. If we do not successfully implement, maintain or expand these systems as planned, our operations may be disrupted, our ability to accurately and timely report our financial results could be impaired, and deficiencies may arise in our internal control over financial reporting, which may impact our ability to certify our financial results. Moreover, our proprietary information or intellectual property could be compromised or misappropriated and our reputation may be adversely affected. If these systems do not operate as we expect them to, we may be required to expend significant resources to make corrections or find alternative sources for performing these functions.
A significant cyber incident could impact production capability, harm our reputation, cause us to breach our contracts with other parties or subject us to regulatory actions or litigation, any of which could materially affect our business, prospects, financial condition and operating results. In addition, our insurance coverage for cyber-attacks may not be sufficient to cover all the losses we may experience as a result of a cyber incident.
Legal and Regulatory Risks Related to Our Business
We are subject to governmental export and import control laws and regulations. Our failure to comply with these laws and regulations could have an adverse effect on our business, prospects, financial condition and results of operations.
Our products and solutions are subject to export control and import laws and regulations, including the U.S. Export Administration Regulations, U.S. Customs regulations and various economic and trade sanctions regulations administered by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Controls. U.S. export control laws and regulations and economic sanctions prohibit the shipment of certain products and services to U.S. embargoed or sanctioned countries, governments and persons. In addition, complying with export control and sanctions regulations for a particular sale may be time-consuming and result in the delay or loss of sales opportunities. Exports of our products and technology must be made in compliance with these laws and regulations. If we fail to comply with these laws and regulations, we and certain of our employees could be subject to substantial civil or criminal penalties, including the possible loss of export or import privileges, fines, which may be imposed on us and responsible employees or managers and, in extreme cases, the incarceration of responsible employees or managers.
Changes to trade policy, tariffs and import/export regulations may have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition and results of operations.
Changes in global political, regulatory and economic conditions or in laws and policies governing foreign trade, manufacturing, development and investment in the territories or countries where we currently purchase our components, sell our products or conduct our business could adversely affect our business. The U.S. has recently instituted or proposed changes in trade policies that include the negotiation or termination of trade agreements, the imposition of higher tariffs on imports into the U.S., economic sanctions on individuals, corporations or countries, and other government regulations affecting trade between the U.S. and other countries where we conduct our business. A number of other nations have proposed or instituted similar measures directed at trade with the United States in response. As a result of these developments, there may be greater restrictions and economic disincentives on international trade that could adversely affect our business. For example, such changes could adversely affect the automotive market, our ability to access key components or raw materials needed to manufacture our products (including, but not limited to, rare-earth metals), our ability to sell our products to customers outside of the U.S. and the demand for our products. It may be time-consuming and expensive for us to alter our business operations to adapt to or comply with any such changes, and any failure to do so could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition and results of operations.
We have in the past and may become involved in legal and regulatory proceedings and commercial or contractual disputes, which could have an adverse effect on our profitability and consolidated financial position.
We may be, from time to time, involved in litigation, regulatory proceedings and commercial or contractual disputes that may be significant. These matters may include, without limitation, disputes with our suppliers and customers, intellectual property claims, stockholder litigation, government investigations, class action lawsuits, personal injury claims, environmental issues, customs and value-added tax disputes and employment and tax issues. In addition, we have in the past and could face in the future a variety of labor and employment claims against us, which could include but is not limited to general discrimination, wage and hour, privacy, ERISA or disability claims. In such matters, government agencies or private parties may seek to recover from us very large, indeterminate amounts in penalties or monetary damages (including, in some cases, treble or punitive damages) or seek to limit our operations in some way. These types of lawsuits could require significant management time and attention or could involve substantial legal liability, adverse regulatory outcomes, and/or substantial expenses to defend. Often these cases raise complex factual and legal issues and create risks and uncertainties. No assurances can be given that any proceedings and claims will not have a material adverse impact on our operating results and consolidated financial position or that our established reserves or our available insurance will mitigate this impact.
We are subject to, and must remain in compliance with, numerous laws and governmental regulations concerning the manufacturing, use, distribution and sale of our products. Some of our customers also require that we comply with their own unique requirements relating to these matters.
We manufacture and sell products that contain electronic components, and such components may contain materials that are subject to government regulation in both the locations where we manufacture and assembles our products, as well as the locations where we sell our products. For example, certain regulations limit the use of lead in electronic components. Since we operate on a global basis, this is a complex process which requires continual monitoring of regulations and an ongoing compliance process to ensure that we and our suppliers are in compliance with existing regulations in each market where we operate. If there is an unanticipated new regulation that significantly impacts our use and sourcing of various components or requires more expensive components, that regulation could materially adversely affect our business, results of operations and financial condition.
Our products are used for autonomous driving and ADAS applications, which are subject to complicated regulatory schemes that vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. These are rapidly evolving areas where new regulations could impose limitations on the use of lidar generally or our products specifically. If we fail to adhere to these new regulations or fail to continually monitor the updates, we may be subject to litigation, loss of customers or negative publicity and our business, results of operations and financial condition will be adversely affected.
We are subject to various environmental laws and regulations that could impose substantial costs upon us and cause delays in building our production facilities.
Concerns over environmental pollution and climate change have produced significant legislative and regulatory efforts on a global basis, and we believe this will continue both in scope and in the number of countries participating. In addition, as climate change issues become more prevalent, foreign, federal, state and local governments and our customers have been responding to these issues. The increased focus on environmental sustainability may result in new regulations and customer requirements, or changes in current regulations and customer requirements, which could materially adversely impact our business, results of operations and financial condition. If we are unable to effectively manage real or perceived issues, including
concerns about environmental impacts or similar matters, sentiments toward us or our products could be negatively impacted, and our business, results of operations or financial condition could suffer.
Our operations are and will be subject to international, federal, state and local environmental laws and regulations, and such laws and regulations could directly increase the cost of energy, which may have an effect on the way we manufacture products or utilize energy to produce our products. In addition, any new regulations or laws in the environmental area might increase the cost of raw materials or key components we use in our products. Environmental regulations require us to reduce product energy usage, monitor and exclude an expanding list of restricted substances and to participate in required recovery and recycling of our products. Environmental and health and safety laws and regulations can be complex, and we have limited experience complying with them. Capital and operating expenses needed to comply with environmental laws and regulations can be significant, and violations may result in substantial fines and penalties, third-party damages, suspension of production or a cessation of our operations. Contamination at properties we operate, we formerly operated or to which hazardous substances were sent by us, may result in liability for us under environmental laws and regulations, including, but not limited to, the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act, which can impose liability for the full amount of remediation-related costs without regard to fault, for the investigation and cleanup of contaminated soil and ground water, for building contamination and impacts to human health and for damages to natural resources. The costs of complying with environmental laws and regulations and any claims concerning noncompliance, or liability with respect to contamination in the future, could have a material adverse effect on our financial condition or operating results. We may face unexpected delays in obtaining the required permits and approvals in connection with our planned production facilities that could require significant time and financial resources and delay our ability to operate these facilities, which would adversely impact our business, prospects, financial condition and operating results.
We are subject to U.S. and foreign anti-corruption and anti-money laundering laws and regulations. We can face criminal liability and other serious consequences for violations, which can harm our business.
We are subject to the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977, as amended, the U.S. domestic bribery statute contained in 18 U.S.C. § 201, the U.S. Travel Act, the USA PATRIOT Act and possibly other anti-bribery and anti-money laundering laws in countries in which we conduct activities. Anti-corruption laws are interpreted broadly and prohibit companies and their employees, agents, contractors and other collaborators from authorizing, promising, offering or providing, directly or indirectly, improper payments or anything else of value to recipients in the public or private sector. We can be held liable for the corrupt or other illegal activities of our employees, agents, contractors and other collaborators, even if we do not explicitly authorize or have actual knowledge of such activities. Any violations of the laws and regulations described above may result in substantial civil and criminal fines and penalties, imprisonment, the loss of export or import privileges, debarment, tax reassessments, breach of contract and fraud litigation, reputational harm and other consequences.
Our business may be adversely affected by changes in automotive and laser regulations or concerns that drive further regulation of the automobile and laser market.
Government product safety regulations are an important factor for our business. Historically, these regulations have imposed ever-more stringent safety regulations for vehicles and laser products. These safety regulations often require, or customers demand that, vehicles have more safety features per vehicle and more advanced safety products.
While we believes increasing automotive and laser safety standards will present a market opportunity for our products, government safety regulations are subject to change based on a number of factors that are not within our control, including new scientific or technological data, adverse publicity regarding the industry recalls and safety risks of autonomous driving and ADAS, accidents involving our products, domestic and foreign political developments or considerations, and litigation relating to our products and our competitors’ products. Changes in government regulations, especially in the autonomous driving and ADAS industries, could adversely affect our business. If government priorities shift and we are unable to adapt to changing regulations, our business may be materially and adversely affected.
Federal and local regulators impose more stringent compliance and reporting requirements in response to product recalls and safety issues in the automotive and laser industry. As cars that carry our sensors go into production, the obligations of complying with safety regulations and reporting requirements could increase and it could require increased resources and adversely affect our business.
Autonomous and ADAS features may be delayed in adoption by OEMs, and our business impacted, as additional emissions and safety requirements are imposed on vehicle manufacturers.
Vehicle regulators globally continue to consider new and enhanced emissions requirements, including electrification, to meet environmental and economic needs as well as pursue new safety standards to address emerging traffic risks. To control new vehicle prices, among other concerns, OEMs may need to dedicate technology and cost additions to new vehicle designs to meet these emissions and safety requirements and postpone the consumer cost pressures of new autonomous and ADAS features.
Our business may be adversely affected if we fail to comply with the regulatory requirements under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic or the Food and Drug Administration (the “FDA”).
As a lidar technology company, we are subject to the Electronic Product Radiation Control Provisions of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. These requirements are enforced by the FDA. Electronic product radiation includes laser technology. Regulations governing these products are intended to protect the public from hazardous or unnecessary exposure. Manufacturers are required to certify in product labeling and reports to the FDA that their products comply with applicable performance standards as well as maintain manufacturing, testing, and distribution records for their products. Failure to comply with these requirements could result in enforcement action by the FDA, which could require us to cease distribution of our products, recall or remediate products already distributed to customers, or subject us to FDA enforcement.
Failures, or perceived failures, to comply with privacy, data protection, and information security requirements in the variety of jurisdictions in which we operate may adversely impact our business, and such legal requirements are evolving, uncertain and may require improvements in, or changes to, our policies and operations.
Our current and potential future operations and sales subject us to laws and regulations addressing privacy and the collection, use, storage, disclosure, transfer and protection of a variety of types of data. For example, the European Commission has adopted the General Data Protection Regulation and California recently enacted the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018, both of which provide for potentially material penalties for non-compliance. These regimes may, among other things, impose data security requirements, disclosure requirements, and restrictions on data collection, uses, and sharing that may impact our operations and the development of our business. While, generally, we do not have access to, collect, store, process, or share information collected by our solutions unless our customers choose to proactively provide such information to us, our products may evolve both to address potential customer requirements or to add new features and functionality. Therefore, the full impact of these privacy regimes on our business is rapidly evolving across jurisdictions and remains uncertain at this time.
We may also be affected by cyber-attacks and other means of gaining unauthorized access to our products, systems, and data. For instance, cyber criminals or insiders may target us or third parties with which we have business relationships to obtain data, or in a manner that disrupts our operations or compromises our products or the systems into which our products are integrated.
We are assessing the continually evolving privacy and data security regimes and measures we believe are appropriate in response. Since these data security regimes are evolving, uncertain and complex, especially for a global business like ours, we may need to update or enhance our compliance measures as our products, markets and customer demands further develop, and these updates or enhancements may require implementation costs. In addition, we may not be able to monitor and react to all developments in a timely manner. The compliance measures we do adopt may prove ineffective. Any failure, or perceived failure, by us to comply with current and future regulatory or customer-driven privacy, data protection, and information security requirements, or to prevent or mitigate security breaches, cyber-attacks, or improper access to, use of, or disclosure of data, or any security issues or cyber-attacks affecting us, could result in significant liability, costs (including the costs of mitigation and recovery), and a material loss of revenue resulting from the adverse impact on our reputation and brand, loss of proprietary information and data, disruption to our business and relationships, and diminished ability to retain or attract customers and business partners. Such events may result in governmental enforcement actions and prosecutions, private litigation, fines and penalties or adverse publicity, and could cause customers and business partners to lose trust in us, which could have an adverse effect on our reputation and business.
Regulations related to conflict minerals may cause us to incur additional expenses and could limit the supply and increase the costs of certain metals used in the manufacturing of our products.
We are subject to the requirements under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, or the Dodd-Frank Act, that will require us to determine, disclose and report whether our products contain conflict minerals. The implementation of these requirements could adversely affect the sourcing, availability and pricing of the materials used in the manufacture of components used in our products. In addition, we will incur additional costs to comply with the disclosure requirements, including costs related to conducting diligence procedures to determine the sources of conflict minerals that may be used in or necessary to the production of our products and, if applicable, potential changes to products, processes or sources of supply as a consequence of such verification activities. It is also possible that our reputation may be adversely affected if we determine that certain of our products contain minerals not determined to be conflict-free or if we are unable to alter our products, processes or sources of supply to avoid use of such materials.
Risks Related to Our Intellectual Property
Despite the actions we are taking to defend and protect our intellectual property, we may not be able to adequately protect or enforce our intellectual property rights or prevent unauthorized parties from copying or reverse engineering our solutions. Our efforts to protect and enforce our intellectual property rights and prevent third parties from violating our rights may be costly.
The success of our products and our business depends in part on our ability to obtain patents and other intellectual property rights and maintain adequate legal protection for our products in the United States and other international jurisdictions. We rely on a combination of patent, service mark, trademark and trade secret laws, as well as confidentiality procedures and contractual restrictions, to establish and protect our proprietary rights, all of which provide only limited protection.
We cannot assure you that any patents will be issued with respect to our currently pending patent applications or that any trademarks will be registered with respect to our currently pending applications in a manner that gives us adequate defensive protection or competitive advantages, if at all, or that any patents issued to us or any trademarks registered by us will not be challenged, invalidated or circumvented. We have filed for patents and trademarks in the United States and in certain international jurisdictions, but such protections may not be available in all countries in which we operate or in which we seek to enforce our intellectual property rights, or may be difficult to enforce in practice. Our currently-issued patents and trademarks and any patents and trademarks that may be issued or registered, as applicable, in the future with respect to pending or future applications may not provide sufficiently broad protection or may not prove to be enforceable in actions against alleged infringers. We cannot be certain that the steps we have taken will prevent unauthorized use of our technology or the reverse engineering of our technology. Moreover, others may independently develop technologies that are competitive to us or infringe our intellectual property.
Protecting against the unauthorized use of our intellectual property, products and other proprietary rights is expensive and difficult, particularly internationally. We believe that our patents are foundational in the area of lidar products and intends to enforce the intellectual property portfolio we have built over the years. Unauthorized parties may attempt to copy or reverse engineer our lidar technology or certain aspects of our solutions that we consider proprietary. Litigation may be necessary in the future to enforce or defend our intellectual property rights, to prevent unauthorized parties from copying or reverse engineering our solutions, to determine the validity and scope of the proprietary rights of others or to block the importation of infringing products into the United States.
Any such litigation, whether initiated by us or a third party, could result in substantial costs and diversion of management resources, either of which could adversely affect our business, operating results and financial condition. Even if we obtain favorable outcomes in litigation, we may not be able to obtain adequate remedies, especially in the context of unauthorized parties copying or reverse engineering our solutions.
Further, many of our current and potential competitors have the ability to dedicate substantially greater resources to defending intellectual property infringement claims and to enforcing their intellectual property rights than we have. Attempts to enforce our rights against third parties could also provoke these third parties to assert their own intellectual property or other rights against us or result in a holding that invalidates or narrows the scope of our rights, in whole or in part. Effective patent, trademark, service mark, copyright and trade secret protection may not be available in every country in which our products are available and competitors based in other countries may sell infringing products in one or more markets. Failure to adequately protect our intellectual property rights could result in our competitors offering similar products, potentially resulting in the loss of some of our competitive advantage and a decrease in our revenue, which would adversely affect our business, operating results, financial condition and prospects.
Third-party claims that we are infringing intellectual property, whether successful or not, could subject us to costly and time-consuming litigation or expensive licenses, and our business could be adversely affected.
Although we hold key patents related to our products, a number of companies, both within and outside of the lidar industry, hold other patents covering aspects of lidar products. In addition to these patents, participants in this industry typically also protect their technology, especially embedded software, through copyrights and trade secrets. As a result, there is frequent litigation based on allegations of infringement, misappropriation or other violations of intellectual property rights. We have received, and in the future may receive, inquiries from other intellectual property holders and may become subject to claims that we infringe their intellectual property rights, particularly as we expand our presence in the market, expand to new use cases and face increasing competition. In addition, parties may claim that the names and branding of our products infringe their trademark rights in certain countries or territories. If such a claim were to prevail, we may have to change the names and branding of our products in the affected territories and we could incur other costs.
We currently have a number of agreements in effect pursuant to which we have agreed to defend, indemnify and hold harmless our customers, suppliers, and channel partners and other partners from damages and costs which may arise from the infringement by our products of third-party patents or other intellectual property rights. The scope of these indemnity
obligations varies, but may, in some instances, include indemnification for damages and expenses, including attorneys’ fees. Our insurance may not cover all intellectual property infringement claims. A claim that our products infringe a third party’s intellectual property rights, even if untrue, could adversely affect our relationships with our customers, may deter future customers from purchasing our products and could expose us to costly litigation and settlement expenses. Even if we are not a party to any litigation between a customer and a third party relating to infringement by our products, an adverse outcome in any such litigation could make it more difficult for us to defend our products against intellectual property infringement claims in any subsequent litigation in which we are a named party. Any of these results could adversely affect our brand and operating results.
Our defense of intellectual property rights claims brought against us or our customers, suppliers and channel partners, with or without merit, could be time-consuming, expensive to litigate or settle, divert management resources and attention and force us to acquire intellectual property rights and licenses, which may involve substantial royalty or other payments and may not be available on acceptable terms or at all. Further, a party making such a claim, if successful, could secure a judgment that requires us to pay substantial damages or obtain an injunction. An adverse determination also could invalidate our intellectual property rights and adversely affect our ability to offer our products to our customers and may require that we procure or develop substitute products that do not infringe, which could require significant effort and expense. Any of these events could adversely affect our business, operating results, financial condition and prospects.
Our intellectual property applications for registration may not issue or be registered, which may have a material adverse effect on our ability to prevent others from commercially exploiting products similar to ours.
We cannot be certain that we are the first inventor of the subject matter to which we have filed a particular patent application, or if we are the first party to file such a patent application. If another party has filed a patent application to the same subject matter as we have, we may not be entitled to the protection sought by the patent application. We also cannot be certain whether the claims included in a patent application will ultimately be allowed in the applicable issued patent. Further, the scope of protection of issued patent claims is often difficult to determine. As a result, we cannot be certain that the patent applications that we file will issue, or that our issued patents will afford protection against competitors with similar technology. In addition, our competitors may design around our issued patents, which may adversely affect our business, prospects, financial condition and operating results.
In addition to patented technology, we rely on our unpatented proprietary technology, trade secrets, processes and know-how.
We rely on proprietary information (such as trade secrets, know-how and confidential information) to protect intellectual property that may not be patentable or subject to copyright, trademark, trade dress or service mark protection, or that we believe is best protected by means that do not require public disclosure. We generally seek to protect this proprietary information by entering into confidentiality agreements, or consulting services or employment agreements that contain non-disclosure and non-use provisions with our employees, consultants, contractors and third parties. However, we may fail to enter into the necessary agreements, and even if entered into, these agreements may be breached or may otherwise fail to prevent disclosure, third-party infringement or misappropriation of our proprietary information, may be limited as to their term and may not provide an adequate remedy in the event of unauthorized disclosure or use of proprietary information. We have limited control over the protection of trade secrets used by our current or future manufacturing partners and suppliers and could lose future trade secret protection if any unauthorized disclosure of such information occurs. In addition, our proprietary information may otherwise become known or be independently developed by our competitors or other third parties. To the extent that our employees, consultants, contractors, advisors and other third parties use intellectual property owned by others in their work for us, disputes may arise as to the rights in related or resulting know-how and inventions. Costly and time-consuming litigation could be necessary to enforce and determine the scope of our proprietary rights, and failure to obtain or maintain protection for our proprietary information could adversely affect our competitive business position. Furthermore, laws regarding trade secret rights in certain markets where we operate may afford little or no protection to our trade secrets.
We also rely on physical and electronic security measures to protect our proprietary information, but we cannot provide assurance that these security measures will not be breached or provide adequate protection for our property. There is a risk that third parties may obtain and improperly utilize our proprietary information to our competitive disadvantage. We may not be able to detect or prevent the unauthorized use of such information or take appropriate and timely steps to enforce our intellectual property rights.
We may be subject to damages resulting from claims that we or our employees have wrongfully used or disclosed alleged trade secrets of our employees’ former employers.
We may be subject to claims that we or our employees have inadvertently or otherwise used or disclosed trade secrets or other proprietary information of an employee’s former employers. Litigation may be necessary to defend against these claims. If we fail in defending such claims, in addition to paying monetary damages, we may lose valuable intellectual property rights
or personnel. A loss of key personnel or their work product could hamper or prevent our ability to commercialize our products, which could severely harm our business. Even if we are successful in defending against these claims, litigation could result in substantial costs and demand on management resources.
Risks Related to Being a Public Company
We will incur increased costs as a result of operating as a public company, and our management will devote substantial time to new compliance initiatives.
As a public company, we will incur significant legal, accounting and other expenses that we did not incur as a private company, and these expenses may increase even more after we are no longer an emerging growth company, as defined in Section 2(a) of the Securities Act. As a public company, we are subject to the reporting requirements of the Exchange Act, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Dodd-Frank Act, as well as rules adopted, and to be adopted, by the SEC and Nasdaq. Our management and other personnel will need to devote a substantial amount of time to these compliance initiatives. Moreover, we expect these rules and regulations to substantially increase our legal and financial compliance costs and to make some activities more time-consuming and costly. The increased costs will increase our net loss. For example, we expect these rules and regulations to make it more difficult and more expensive for us to obtain director and officer liability insurance and we may be forced to accept reduced policy limits or incur substantially higher costs to maintain the same or similar coverage. We cannot predict or estimate the amount or timing of additional costs we may incur to respond to these requirements. The impact of these requirements could also make it more difficult for us to attract and retain qualified persons to serve on our Board, our Board committees or as executive officers.
Our management team has limited experience managing a public company.
Most of the members of our management team have limited experience managing a publicly traded company, interacting with public company investors, and complying with the increasingly complex laws pertaining to public companies. Additionally, some members of our management team were recently hired. Our management team may not successfully or efficiently manage their new roles and responsibilities. Our transition to being a public company subjects us to significant regulatory oversight and reporting obligations under the federal securities laws and the continuous scrutiny of securities analysts and investors. These new obligations and constituents will require significant attention from our senior management and could divert their attention away from the day-to-day management of our business, which could adversely affect our business, financial condition, and operating results.
Unanticipated changes in effective tax rates or adverse outcomes resulting from examination of our income or other tax returns could adversely affect our financial condition and results of operations.
We will be subject to income taxes in the United States and other jurisdictions, and our tax liabilities will be subject to the allocation of expenses in differing jurisdictions. Our future effective tax rates could be subject to volatility or adversely affected by a number of factors, including:
•changes in the valuation of our deferred tax assets and liabilities;
•expected timing and amount of the release of any tax valuation allowances;
•tax effects of stock-based compensation;
•costs related to intercompany restructurings;
•changes in tax laws, regulations or interpretations thereof; or
•lower than anticipated future earnings in jurisdictions where we have lower statutory tax rates and higher than anticipated future earnings in jurisdictions where we have higher statutory tax rates.
In addition, we may be subject to audits of our income, sales and other transaction taxes by taxing authorities. Outcomes from these audits could have an adverse effect on our financial condition and results of operations.
Changes in laws, regulations or rules, or a failure to comply with any laws, regulations or rules, may adversely affect our business, investments and results of operations.
We are subject to laws, regulations and rules enacted by national, regional and local governments and Nasdaq. In particular, we are required to comply with certain SEC, Nasdaq and other legal or regulatory requirements. Compliance with, and monitoring of, applicable laws, regulations and rules may be difficult, time consuming and costly. Those laws, regulations or rules and their interpretation and application may also change from time to time and those changes could have a material adverse effect on our business, investments and results of operations. In addition, a failure to comply with applicable laws, regulations or rules, as interpreted and applied, could have a material adverse effect on our business and results of operations.
Risks Related to Ownership of Our Shares
Our Second Amended and Restated Certificate of Incorporation provides, subject to limited exceptions, that the Court of Chancery of the State of Delaware (the “Chancery Court”) will be the sole and exclusive forum for certain stockholder litigation matters, which could limit our stockholders’ ability to obtain a chosen judicial forum for disputes with us or our directors, officers, employees or stockholders.
Our Second Amended and Restated Certificate of Incorporation requires, to the fullest extent permitted by law, that derivative actions brought in our name, actions against directors, officers and employees for breach of fiduciary duty and other similar actions may be brought in the Chancery Court or, if that court lacks subject matter jurisdiction, another federal or state court situated in the State of Delaware. Any person or entity purchasing or otherwise acquiring any interest in shares of our capital stock shall be deemed to have notice of and consented to the forum provisions in our Second Amended and Restated Certificate of Incorporation. In addition, our Second Amended and Restated Certificate of Incorporation and Amended and Restated Bylaws provide that the federal district courts of the United States shall be the exclusive forum for the resolution of any complaint asserting a cause of action under the Securities Act and the Exchange Act.
In March 2020, the Delaware Supreme Court issued a decision in Salzburg et al. v. Sciabacucchi, which found that an exclusive forum provision providing for claims under the Securities Act to be brought in federal court is facially valid under Delaware law. It is unclear whether this decision will be appealed, or what the final outcome of this case will be. We intend to enforce this provision, but we do not know whether courts in other jurisdictions will agree with this decision or enforce it.
This choice of forum provision may limit a stockholder’s ability to bring a claim in a judicial forum of its choosing for disputes with us or any of our directors, officers, other employees or stockholders, which may discourage lawsuits with respect to such claims. Alternatively, if a court were to find the choice of forum provision contained in our Second Amended and Restated Certificate of Incorporation to be inapplicable or unenforceable in an action, we may incur additional costs associated with resolving such action in other jurisdictions, which could harm our business, operating results and financial condition.
Our charter documents and Delaware law could prevent a takeover that stockholders consider favorable and could also reduce the market price of our stock.
Our Second Amended and Restated Certificate of Incorporation and Amended and Restated Bylaws contain provisions that could delay or prevent a change in control. These provisions could also make it more difficult for stockholders to elect directors and take other corporate actions. These provisions include:
•providing for a classified board of directors with staggered, three-year terms;
•authorizing our Board to issue Preferred Stock with voting or other rights or preferences that could discourage a takeover attempt or delay changes in control;
•prohibiting cumulative voting in the election of directors;
•providing that vacancies on our Board may be filled only by a majority of directors then in office, even though less than a quorum;
•prohibiting the adoption, amendment or repeal of the Amended and Restated Bylaws or the repeal of the provisions of our Second Amended and Restated Certificate of Incorporation regarding the election and removal of directors without the required approval of at least two-thirds of the shares entitled to vote at an election of directors;
•prohibiting stockholder action by written consent;
•limiting the persons who may call special meetings of stockholders; and
•requiring advance notification of stockholder nominations and proposals.
These provisions may frustrate or prevent any attempts by our stockholders to replace or remove our current management by making it more difficult for stockholders to replace members of our Board, which is responsible for appointing the members of our management. In addition, we are governed by the provisions of Section 203 of the Delaware General Corporation Law (the “DGCL”). These provisions may prohibit large stockholders, in particular those owning 15% or more of our outstanding voting stock, from merging or combining with us for a certain period of time without the consent of our Board.
These and other provisions in our Second Amended and Restated Certificate of Incorporation and our Amended and Restated Bylaws and under Delaware law could discourage potential takeover attempts, reduce the price investors might be willing to pay in the future for shares of Class A common stock and result in the market price of Class A common stock being lower than it would be without these provisions.
Claims for indemnification by our directors and officers may reduce our available funds to satisfy successful third-party claims against us and may reduce the amount of money available to us.
Our Second Amended and Restated Certificate of Incorporation and Amended and Restated Bylaws provide that we will indemnify our directors and officers, in each case to the fullest extent permitted by Delaware law.
In addition, as permitted by Section 145 of the DGCL, the Amended and Restated Bylaws and the indemnification agreements that we have entered into with our directors and officers provide that:
•we will indemnify our directors and officers for serving us in those capacities or for serving other business enterprises at our request, to the fullest extent permitted by Delaware law. Delaware law provides that a corporation may indemnify such person if such person acted in good faith and in a manner such person reasonably believed to be in or not opposed to the best interests of the registrant and, with respect to any criminal proceeding, had no reasonable cause to believe such person’s conduct was unlawful;
•we may, in our discretion, indemnify employees and agents in those circumstances where indemnification is permitted by applicable law;
•we will be required to advance expenses, as incurred, to our directors and officers in connection with defending a proceeding, except that such directors or officers shall undertake to repay such advances if we are ultimately determined that such person is not entitled to indemnification;
•we will not be obligated pursuant to our Amended and Restated Bylaws to indemnify a person with respect to proceedings initiated by that person against us or our other indemnitees, except with respect to proceedings authorized by our Board or brought to enforce a right to indemnification;
•the rights conferred in the Amended and Restated Bylaws are not exclusive, and we are authorized to enter into indemnification agreements with our directors, officers, employees and agents and to obtain insurance to indemnify such persons; and
•we may not retroactively amend our Amended and Restated Bylaw provisions to reduce our indemnification obligations to directors, officers, employees and agents.
The dual class structure of our Common Stock has the effect of concentrating voting control with Austin Russell, our Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer. This will limit or preclude your ability to influence corporate matters, including the outcome of important transactions, including a change in control.
Shares of our Class B common stock, $0.0001 par value per share (“Class B common stock”), have 10 votes per share, while shares of Class A common stock have one vote per share. Austin Russell, our Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer, holds all of the issued and outstanding shares of Class B common stock. Accordingly, Mr. Russell held approximately 82.8% of the voting power of our outstanding capital stock as of December 31, 2020 and will be able to control matters submitted to our stockholders for approval, including the election of directors, amendments of our organizational documents and any merger, consolidation, sale of all or substantially all of our assets or other major corporate transactions. Mr. Russell may have interests that differ from yours and may vote in a way with which you disagree and which may be adverse to your interests. This concentrated control may have the effect of delaying, preventing or deterring a change in control of us, could deprive our stockholders of an opportunity to receive a premium for their capital stock as part of a sale of us, and might ultimately affect the market price of shares of Class A common stock.
In connection with the execution of the Merger Agreement, Austin Russell entered into a voting agreement, dated as of August 24, 2020, with Gores (the “Voting Agreement”). Under the Voting Agreement, Mr. Russell agreed that, following the consummation of the Business Combination, solely if he is involuntarily terminated from his position as the Chief Executive Officer of the Company and as a result of his conviction of, or pleading guilty or nolo contendere to, a felony that has a material negative impact on the Company, at any meeting of the stockholders of the Company at which directors are to be elected following the consummation of the Business Combination, Mr. Russell, or any of his permitted successors or assigns, will not vote more than 10% of the Class B common stock he or they beneficially own in any director election.
We are a controlled company within the meaning of The Nasdaq Stock Market listing standards, and, as a result, qualify for exemptions from certain corporate governance requirements that provide protection to stockholders of other companies. To the extent we utilize any of these exemptions, you will not have the same protections afforded to stockholders of companies that are subject to such requirements. We do not currently intend to rely on the exemptions afforded to controlled companies at this time.
So long as more than 50% of the voting power for the election of our directors is held by an individual, a group or another company, we will qualify as a “controlled company” under The Nasdaq Stock Market listing requirements. Austin Russell controls a majority of the voting power of our outstanding capital stock. As a result, we are a “controlled company”
under the Nasdaq Stock Market rules. As a controlled company, we are exempt from certain Nasdaq corporate governance requirements, including those that would otherwise require our Board to have a majority of independent directors and require that we establish a compensation committee comprised entirely of independent directors, or otherwise ensure that the compensation of our executive officers and nominees for directors are determined or recommended to our Board by the independent members of our Board. While we do not currently intend to rely on any of these exemptions, we will be entitled to do so for as long as we are considered a “controlled company,” and to the extent we rely on one or more of these exemptions, holders of our capital stock will not have the same protections afforded to stockholders of companies that are subject to all of Nasdaq’s corporate governance requirements.
Our dual class structure may depress the trading price of the Class A common stock.
We cannot predict whether our dual class structure will result in a lower or more volatile market price of the Class A common stock or in adverse publicity or other adverse consequences. For example, certain index providers have announced restrictions on including companies with multiple-class share structures in certain of their indexes. S&P Dow Jones and FTSE Russell have announced changes to their eligibility criteria for inclusion of shares of public companies on certain indices, including the S&P 500, pursuant to which companies with multiple classes of shares of common stock are excluded. In addition, several stockholder advisory firms have announced their opposition to the use of multiple class structures. As a result, the dual class structure of our Common Stock may cause stockholder advisory firms to publish negative commentary about our corporate governance practices or otherwise seek to cause us to change our capital structure. Any such exclusion from indices or any actions or publications by stockholder advisory firms critical of our corporate governance practices or capital structure could adversely affect the value and trading market of the Class A common stock.
Sales of shares of Class A common stock in the public market or the perception that these sales or conversions might occur may depress the market price of Class A common stock and could impair our ability to raise capital through the sale of additional equity securities. It is difficult to predict the effect that such sales or conversions may have on the prevailing market price of the Class A common stock.
We do not intend to pay dividends for the foreseeable future.
We have never declared or paid any cash dividends on our capital stock and do not intend to pay any cash dividends in the foreseeable future. We expect to retain future earnings, if any, to fund the development and growth of our business. Any future determination to pay dividends on our capital stock will be at the discretion of our Board. Accordingly, investors must rely on sales of our Class A common stock after price appreciation, which may never occur, as the only way to realize any future gains on their investments.
The market price and trading volume of Class A common stock may be volatile and could decline significantly.
The stock markets, including Nasdaq on which we list our shares of Class A common stock, have from time to time experienced significant price and volume fluctuations. Even if an active, liquid and orderly trading market develops and is sustained for the Class A common stock, the market price of Class A common stock may be volatile and could decline significantly. In addition, the trading volume in Class A common stock may fluctuate and cause significant price variations to occur. If the market price of Class A common stock declines significantly, you may be unable to resell your shares at an attractive price (or at all). We cannot assure you that the market price of Class A common stock will not fluctuate widely or decline significantly in the future in response to a number of factors, including, among others, the following:
•the realization of any of the risk factors presented in this Annual Report;
•actual or anticipated differences in our estimates, or in the estimates of analysts, for our revenues, Adjusted EBITDA, results of operations, level of indebtedness, liquidity or financial condition;
•additions and departures of key personnel;
•failure to comply with the requirements of Nasdaq;
•failure to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act or other laws or regulations;
•future issuances, sales, resales or repurchases or anticipated issuances, sales, resales or repurchases, of our securities;
•publication of research reports about us;
•the performance and market valuations of other similar companies;
•commencement of, or involvement in, litigation involving us;
•broad disruptions in the financial markets, including sudden disruptions in the credit markets;
•speculation in the press or investment community;
•actual, potential or perceived control, accounting or reporting problems;
•changes in accounting principles, policies and guidelines; and
•other events or factors, including those resulting from infectious diseases, health epidemics and pandemics (including the ongoing COVID-19 public health emergency), natural disasters, war, acts of terrorism or responses to these events.
In the past, securities class-action litigation has often been instituted against companies following periods of volatility in the market price of their shares. This type of litigation could result in substantial costs and divert our management’s attention and resources, which could have a material adverse effect on us.
The exercise of warrants for our Class A common stock would increase the number of shares eligible for future resale in the public market and result in dilution to our stockholders.
As of December 31, 2020, we had warrants to purchase an aggregate of 24.1 million shares of our Class A common stock outstanding. On February 3, 2021, we announced that holders of our 13,333,309 outstanding public warrants to purchase shares of our Class A common stock (the “Public Warrants”), will have until March 5, 2021 to exercise their Public Warrants. The Public Warrants were exercisable for an aggregate of 13,333,309 shares of Class A common stock at a price of $11.50 per share. On March 10, 2021, we changed the previously announced redemption date of March 5, 2021 to a new redemption date of March 16, 2021 for the redemption of our outstanding public warrants. As of March 16, 2021, 3,589,645 Private Warrants and 13,128,671 Public Warrants were exercised. To the extent remaining warrants are exercised, additional shares of Class A common stock will be issued, which will result in dilution to the then-existing holders of Class A common stock and increase the number of shares eligible for resale in the public market. Sales of substantial numbers of such shares in the public market or the fact that such warrants may be exercised could adversely affect the market price of our Class A common stock.
If securities or industry analysts do not publish or cease publishing research or reports about us, our business, or our market, or if they change their recommendations regarding our Class A common stock adversely, then the price and trading volume of our Class A common stock could decline.
The trading market for our Class A common stock will be influenced by the research and reports that industry or securities analysts may publish about us, our business, our market, or our competitors. Securities and industry analysts do not currently, and may never, publish research on us. If no securities or industry analysts commence coverage of us, our stock price and trading volume would likely be negatively impacted. If any of the analysts who may cover us change their recommendation regarding our stock adversely, or provide more favorable relative recommendations about our competitors, the price of our Class A common stock would likely decline. If any analyst who may cover us were to cease coverage of us or fail to regularly publish reports on us, we could lose visibility in the financial markets, which could cause our stock price or trading volume to decline.
Future issuances of debt securities and equity securities may adversely affect us, including the market price of the Class A common stock and may be dilutive to existing stockholders.
In the future, we may incur debt or issue equity ranking senior to the Class A common stock. Those securities will generally have priority upon liquidation. Such securities also may be governed by an indenture or other instrument containing covenants restricting its operating flexibility. Additionally, any convertible or exchangeable securities that we issue in the future may have rights, preferences and privileges more favorable than those of the Class A common stock. Because our decision to issue debt or equity in the future will depend on market conditions and other factors beyond our control, we cannot predict or estimate the amount, timing, nature or success of our future capital raising efforts. As a result, future capital raising efforts may reduce the market price of Class A common stock and be dilutive to existing stockholders.
Our failure to meet the continued listing requirements of Nasdaq could result in a delisting of our securities.
If we fail to satisfy the continued listing requirements of Nasdaq such as the corporate governance requirements or the minimum closing bid price requirement, Nasdaq may take steps to delist our securities. Such a delisting would likely have a negative effect on the price of the securities and would impair your ability to sell or purchase the securities when you wish to do so. In the event of a delisting, we can provide no assurance that any action taken by us to restore compliance with listing requirements would allow our securities to become listed again, stabilize the market price or improve the liquidity of our securities, prevent our securities from dropping below the Nasdaq minimum bid price requirement or prevent future non-compliance with Nasdaq’s listing requirements. Additionally, if our securities are not listed on, or become delisted from, Nasdaq for any reason, and are quoted on the OTC Bulletin Board, an inter-dealer automated quotation system for equity securities that is not a national securities exchange, the liquidity and price of our securities may be more limited than if we were
quoted or listed on Nasdaq or another national securities exchange. You may be unable to sell your securities unless a market can be established or sustained.
We are an emerging growth company as well as a smaller reporting company within the meaning of the Securities Act, and if we take advantage of certain exemptions from disclosure requirements available to emerging growth companies or smaller reporting companies, this could make our securities less attractive to investors and may make it more difficult to compare our performance with other public companies.
We are an “emerging growth company” within the meaning of the Securities Act, as modified by the JOBS Act, and may take advantage of certain exemptions from various reporting requirements that are applicable to other public companies that are not emerging growth companies for as long as we continue to be an emerging growth company, including, but not limited to, not being required to comply with the auditor attestation requirements of Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, reduced disclosure obligations regarding executive compensation in our periodic reports and proxy statements, and exemptions from the requirements of holding a nonbinding advisory vote on executive compensation and stockholder approval of any golden parachute payments not previously approved. As a result, our stockholders may not have access to certain information they may deem important. We will remain an emerging growth company until the earliest of (i) the last day of the fiscal year in which the market value of Common Stock that is held by non-affiliates exceeds $700 million as of the end of that year’s second fiscal quarter, (ii) the last day of the fiscal year in which we have total annual gross revenue of $1.07 billion or more during such fiscal year (as indexed for inflation), (iii) the date on which we have issued more than $1 billion in non-convertible debt in the prior three-year period or (iv) December 31, 2024. Investors may find our securities less attractive because we will rely on these exemptions. If some investors find our securities less attractive as a result of our reliance on these exemptions, the trading prices of our securities may be lower than they otherwise would be, there may be a less active trading market for our securities and the trading prices of our securities may be more volatile.
In addition, Section 107 of the JOBS Act also provides that an emerging growth company can take advantage of the exemption from complying with new or revised accounting standards provided in Section 7(a)(2)(B) of the Securities Act as long as we are an emerging growth company. An emerging growth company can therefore delay the adoption of certain accounting standards until those standards would otherwise apply to private companies. We have elected not to opt out of such extended transition period and, therefore, we may not be subject to the same new or revised accounting standards as other public companies that are not emerging growth companies. This may make comparison of our financial statements with another public company which is neither an emerging growth company nor an emerging growth company which has opted out of using the extended transition period difficult or impossible because of the potential differences in accountant standards used.
Additionally, we are a “smaller reporting company” as defined in Item 10(f)(1) of Regulation S-K. Smaller reporting companies may take advantage of certain reduced disclosure obligations, including, among other things, providing only two years of audited financial statements. We will remain a smaller reporting company until the last day of the fiscal year in which (i) the market value of Common Stock held by non-affiliates exceeds $250 million as of the end of that year’s second fiscal quarter, or (ii) our annual revenues exceeded $100 million during such completed fiscal year and the market value of Common Stock held by non-affiliates exceeds $700 million as of the end of that year’s second fiscal quarter. To the extent we take advantage of such reduced disclosure obligations, it may also make comparison of our financial statements with other public companies difficult or impossible.