As of today, they’ve taken in $250 million in disclosed funding from investors that include Volvo, Peter Thiel, and Corning. They have 70% market share for all 7 use cases they’re targetting? They have a great brand, and as the original inventors of 3D imaging LiDAR for AVs, robotics, and mapping, it is likely that a large percentage of technology, mapping and automotive companies pursuing ADAS and AVs have used their products.

An article by Wired earlier this year titled “Of late, the lidar industry has shown signs of consolidation, and some see a shakeout coming. Once finalized, Graf Industrial will be renamed Velodyne Lidar and trade on the NYSE under the new ticker symbol VLDR. Once Graf's merger with Velodyne is complete, the merged company will be named Velodyne Lidar and its ticker symbol will be VLDR.

Current Velodyne shareholders will own 83.5% of the company after the closing, and after withdrawing $50 million in cash. I led the automotive LIDAR business at Princeton Lightwave until 2017, when the company was sold.

The stock price of GRAF has nearly doubled since the deal was announced in early July 2020. More than 50% of their revenue comes from non-automotive applications. The Chinese startup in our list went from a fresh round of $16 million back in 2017 to just over $231 million in funding today from names like Bosch and Baidu. Sounds like a great company, but there are still some concerns and unanswered questions.This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.Here at Nanalyze, we hold the lion's share of our investing dollars in a portfolio of 30 dividend growth stocks. Seems unlikely. An S-1 would have spelled that out. – Transaction […] GRAF and Velodyne have successfully raised $150MM in equity from a group of institutional investors, subject to completion of the transaction. Today, they’ve taken in The self-described “global leader in 3D sensing and one of the first companies to pioneer 3D LiDAR for commercialization,” took in more undisclosed funding since 2017 with the last round being a Series C in October 2018. Become a Nanalyze Premium subscriber to access our report on A 1)   The merger will result in ~ $200M on Velodyne’s balance sheet – money to be used for product development, manufacturing expansion and acquisitions. I believe the first consolidation targets for Velodyne will be within this cell because as I argue above, they need to transition away from their traditional products to the lower cost, lower ASP, higher unit volume Vela product line.

About four years ago, we first discussed a technology called LiDAR, and in that piece we talked about The original use case for LiDAR was autonomous driving, but plenty more applications have emerged in areas such as general mobility, mapping, Velodyne’s founder and industry icon, David Hall, invented real-time surround view lidar systems in 2005. They seem well funded or diversified into non-auto markets and can probably survive as independent companies.Optics and LiDAR are becoming more exciting than ever. Cell ❸ companies bring in the higher performance capability, complement the overall LiDAR suite and provide a full bundle for their AV customers. I believe this will occur, possibly through another SPAC based reverse merger which seems highly efficient for high tech companies as compared to traditional Wall street IPOs.

At this point, it is unclear if and how companies in Cells ❹ and ❺ will consolidate.

As for contract revenues, those aren’t guaranteed. Patiently !Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.I write about perception, sensors and LIDAR for autonomous vehicles, drones and robots a 3-dimensional image around the vehicle is displayed at the Las Vegas Convention Center on January 9, 2013 in Las Vegas, Nevada. CES, the world's largest annual consumer technology trade show, runs from January 8-11 and is expected to feature 3,100 exhibitors showing off their latest products and services to about 150,000 attendees.AFP PHOTO / JOE KLAMAR (Photo credit should read JOE KLAMAR/AFP via Getty Images) A SPAC has done the legwork already, is listed, has raised investment capital with experienced investors, and is simply waiting to consummate its charter by merging with a potentially good investment prospect.

Backed by strategic investors that include Ford, Baidu, Nikon, and Hyundai Mobis, Velodyne’s LiDAR solutions now come in multiple form factors that address multiple use cases.They’ve now sold more than 40,000 units to more than 300 customers having booked $570 million in revenues to date. Last time we checked, LeddarTech had taken in $16 million to develop solid-state LiDAR that claimed a 25X improvement in sensitivity over other LiDARs. Like the other firms we’ve looked at, they’re also “the global leader” in LiDAR with a suite of innovative sensor solutions that they’re selling to customers in 20 countries.