![]() It announced in August that it would be merging with Luminar Technologies and the deal was completed overnight. Gores Metropoulos was floated last year by Gores Group, the California-based private equity firm and Dean Metropoulos, the billionaire investor best known for his rescue of the bakery company Hostess Brands. They are businesses that float on the stock market without any assets, but which raise capital in order to acquire an existing business, providing a quick and easy way for unlisted companies to come to the stock market without having to go through lengthy regulatory approval processes and the endless roadshows to would-be investors. SPACs are similar to the old 'shell' companies that used to be familiar in the UK. Image: Luminar came to market on Wall Street via a special purpose acquisition company It merged with a so-called special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, called Gores Metropoulos. The method by which Luminar came to market was one that has been one of the biggest crazes on Wall Street this year. "We've locked up key exclusives and even acquired some of the relevant suppliers, some of the only people in the world that can do these things." "We have the largest patent portfolio in the industry for these sensing systems, more than the top five Lidar R&D efforts combined here. "And this is how we're able to solve the problems, able to solve the technology, the performance, the safety, the economics. "We've pioneered all these core components and building them entirely from the ground up - we're not using off-the-shelf parts and commodity parts like people have historically. "We have one of the most insane moats of any companies at this stage. He went on: "For this it's dramatically different and it comes down to very high intellectual property. Mr Russell insisted that, despite the sharp decline in the price of Lidar in the last decade, he was confident the service would not become a commodity. He added: "We've been building up our book here and have expanded for a forward-looking order book of $1.3bn (£950m) estimated business from all the deals we've got here." Mr Russell, whose shareholding in Luminar was valued at $2.4bn (£1.75bn) prior to the start of trading, said there was a "half a trillion addressable opportunity" for the company in terms of sales it could chase. Other deals have been signed with the truck-making division of German giant Daimler and, only last week, Luminar signed a deal with Mobileye, part of the chip-making giant Intel, to include its Lidar technology into Mobileye's integrated self-driving package. Unlike some of its competitors, Luminar already has orders to incorporate its Lidar technology into vehicles made by existing carmakers, including Chinese-owned Volvo. Since then, other companies have been racing to bring the price down further with Luminar and its competitors, including Velodyne, targeting less than $1,000 (£730) per unit. ![]() ![]() Just under a decade ago, a single Lidar unit cost as much as $75,000 (£55,000), but in 2017 Waymo said it had brought the price down to just a tenth of that. Luminar is not the only company playing in the field and, in common with rivals, has been actively trying to bring down the price of Lidar. Image: Mr Russell received a $100,000 fellowship from Peter Thiel
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