What happened to Ibeo, the pioneer of LiDAR that caught the “first train” but now filed for bankruptcy?

Ibeo, the global pioneer of automotive lidar, recently announced that it has filed for bankruptcy and is in negotiations with potential investors.

At present, the Hamburg Court in Germany has approved Ibeo to manage the bankruptcy procedure on its own. The company's management is still fully responsible for operations and is leading the search for investors; the salaries of more than 400 employees have been guaranteed until the end of November.

Ibeo management has been in talks with potential investors since May, and negotiations are expected to continue in the coming months in an effort to preserve the company and the jobs of its more than 400 employees.

Why is Ibeo called the "pioneer of lidar"?

In fact, as early as 2010, Ibeo had cooperated with Valeo to develop automotive lidar; seven years later, in 2017, Ibeo was behind the world's first mass-produced lidar car, the Audi A8.

But why did Ibeo end up filing for bankruptcy when it had clearly gained an advantage in its layout?

Judging from the company’s statement, the main reason for filing for bankruptcy was “inability to obtain further growth financing.”

Looking back over the past two decades since Ibeo was founded in 1998, the company has only publicly disclosed two rounds of financing: the first was in 2016, when automotive parts giant ZF bought 40% of Ibeo's shares; the second was in 2021, when China's AAC Technologies became a new shareholder of the company.

In addition, unlike the new wave of fixed-point LiDARs that are now favored by many car companies, Ibeo's customer list is not very long.

In addition to Audi mentioned above, Ibeo signed a letter of intent for cooperation with Great Wall Motors in 2019. After a year of preliminary development, Great Wall Motors' WEY SUV series models will be equipped with IbeoNEXT solid-state laser radar and are scheduled to go into production in 2022.

It is worth mentioning that ZF, which acquired 40% of Ibeo’s shares, was designated as Great Wall Motor’s ADAS supplier at almost the same time as Ibeo and began mass production and delivery.

But Ibeo is not the only LiDAR supplier for Great Wall Motors - in August this year, RoboSense announced that it would supply LiDAR for the LiDAR version of Weipai's flagship model Mocha DHT-PHEV.

2022 (some say 2021) is called the "first year of mass production of lidar" by many institutional analysts, but this does not mean that dawn is coming for Ibeo - the lidars that have entered the first year of mass production are actually mostly semi-solid-state lidars.

Statistics from a previous report by Capital Securities showed that among the 13 front-mounted laser radar models mass-produced in my country this year, four models were equipped with rotating mirror scanning laser radars, eight were equipped with semi-solid-state laser radars, and only one was equipped with solid-state laser radars.

Since technical difficulties such as high processing difficulty and small scanning angle have not yet been resolved, the pure solid-state lidar that Ibeo insists on is relatively expensive and difficult to be installed on vehicles on a large scale for the time being; in comparison, the "transitional solution" semi-solid-state lidar has become the mainstream choice for automakers.