Ouster, a LiDAR sensor manufacturer, raises another $42 million

According to foreign media reports, on September 8, local time, Ouster, a San Francisco-based lidar startup, announced that it had raised $42 million in its latest round of financing (Series B), bringing its total financing to $140 million. Angus Pacala, the company's co-founder and CEO, said that the company will use the newly raised funds to develop products and support international sales.

Image credit: Ouster

There are signs that Ouster is continuing to grow despite some headwinds. No new investors appeared in this round of financing. Existing investors Cox Automotive, Fontinalis Partners and Tao Capital Partners all participated in this round, and it was smaller than the previous $60 million Series A. Ouster also confirmed that, like other companies, it has laid off 10% of its employees due to the COVID-19 epidemic.

However, it is worth noting that Ouster successfully completed a new round of financing during the epidemic, and sales continued to grow, even though its factory in San Francisco was temporarily closed due to government epidemic shutdown regulations. The company said that business growth was sufficient to avoid further layoffs and allow it to pay all employees and temporary workers in full.

While Ouster won’t disclose specific revenue figures, the company said its 12-month revenue grew 62% and third-quarter bookings were up 209% year-over-year. These numbers make sense given the company’s business model and the expansion of its production lines. In addition, the company’s customer base has grown from 400 in March 2019 to more than 800, including Postmates, Ike, May Mobility, Kodiak Robotics, Coast Autonomous, the US Army, NASA, Stanford University, and MIT.

Lidar sensors are at the heart of self-driving car systems such as Waymo, Uber, Aurora and Cruise. They measure the distance of objects by emitting lasers and measuring the reflected pulses, and their use is not limited to the automotive field. Lidar sensors are often used to detect obstacles and map in mining robots, space atmosphere research, forestry management, wind power plant optimization, speed limit enforcement, and even video games.

However, Ouster takes a different approach to its technology and business model than many of its competitors.

The company uses a standard process to print lasers and photodetectors on two chips to produce integrated circuits (CMOS). Ouster says this approach allows it to abandon the common practice of stacking discrete components on top of each other to achieve the required resolution, and this approach can make more reliable, cheaper and less complex sensors.

Ouster has three production lines - OS-0, OS-1 and OS-2, producing four models and more than 50 configurations of sensors. The OS-1 series sensors are designed for medium and short-range applications, with a detection range of 150 meters, a resolution of 16 to 128 channels, and a weight of about 380 grams, making it the lightest sensor on the market. The OS-2 sensor has a detection range of more than 200 meters, with 64-beam and 128-beam resolution and a 22.5-degree vertical field of view.

In January this year, Ouster also launched new 32-channel sensors (OS-0 and OS-1 versions), as well as new configurations of 32-beam and 64-beam sensors. A few months ago, the company also launched Ouster Studio, a plug-and-play software package, to quickly visualize, record and analyze lidar sensor data. Recently, Ouster has also opened offices in Paris, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Hong Kong and Suzhou. Ouster now has two factories. The San Francisco factory opened in March 2019 and is mainly used to produce new products with lower production volumes. Once its products are certified, Ouster will move production to the factory of Benchmark, a contract manufacturer in Southeast Asia. According to Ouster, the Benchmark factory can now produce hundreds to thousands of second-generation sensors per month.

The lidar market is expected to be worth $1.8 billion in just five years, and there are many players in the market. To date, Israeli startup Innoviz Technologies has raised a total of $252 million; Luminar says it has developed a lidar sensor with a detection range of more than 250 meters, and successfully "listed through a reverse merger" in its latest reverse merger; not to mention far-infrared sensor technology pioneer AdaSky, ground-penetrating radar startup WaveSense, speed sensor company Aeva, etc., all of which are also seeking to develop technologies to complement traditional, vision-based autonomous vehicle perception systems.

However, Ouster believes that its delivery time is only 2 to 3 weeks and the sensor has a small and compact form factor, which makes it ahead of other sensor companies. In addition, the OS-1 sensor starts at only $3,500, which is a relatively cheap sensor in the lidar industry, and Ouster also provides discounts on certain products to non-profit organizations.