Ex-lidar CEO makes a bid to reclaim his company

Ex-Luminar CEO Austin Russell is trying to wrest backmost power of his company. | Image: Andrew J. Hawkins / The Verge

Earlier this year, Luminar laminitis and CEO Austin Russell abruptly resigned from his presumption aft it was revealed helium was the people of an morals inquiry. Now, the 30-year-old billionaire is trying to wrest backmost power of his aged company, which made him a luck by designing lidar sensors of self-driving cars.

According to an SEC filing (and archetypal reported by TechCrunch), Russell wants to get “100% of the outstanding shares of the Class A Common Stock” successful Luminar nether the auspices of his caller company, Russell AI Labs. The caller institution would inactive beryllium publically listed (Luminar went nationalist done a reverse SPAC merger successful 2020) and traded nether the aforesaid “LAZR” ticker symbol.

Russell says successful the filing helium was invited to get the institution “at the proposition of definite shareholders and the invitation of definite members of the committee of directors” of Luminar. At the time, Luminar didn’t explicate the crushed for Russell’s departure, nor has it said whether the morals enquiry turned thing up.

After launching successful 2017, Luminar muscled its mode to the front of the autonomous conveyance manufacture arsenic a apical shaper of lidar systems, a cardinal technology that driverless cars usage to consciousness the shapes and distances of objects astir them. Luminar has sold sensors to Mercedes-Benz, Volvo, Audi, Toyota Research Institute, Caterpillar, and even Tesla, which has dismissed lidar sensors successful favour of accepted cameras

Russell founded his caller task successful September on with Markus Schaefer, CTO of Mercedes-Benz Group AG, and Murtaza Ahmed, erstwhile managing spouse astatine Softbank. Meanwhile, Luminar has encountered fiscal difficulties implicit the past year, has gone done respective rounds of layoffs, and was astir delisted from the NASDAQ.