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"Awesome and surreal":
Luminar founder
Austin Russell
can still be happy and surprised about the world of the stock market
Photo: Nasdaq Inc.
Austin Russell,
25, is now one of the youngest billionaires in the world.
This is what the "Wall Street Journal" calculates after the first day of trading in Luminar shares on the New York technology exchange Nasdaq.
On Thursday, the young boss of the manufacturer of lidar sensors was allowed to ring the stock market bell.
At the close of trading, the company he founded in 2012 was worth 28 percent more at a price of $ 23: $ 7.8 billion, of which around a third belongs to Russell, who even has 83 percent of the voting rights.
The share continued to rise on Friday (see chart).
The "Forbes" magazine found only ten billionaires under 30 worldwide in April, three of them are younger than Russell: reality TV star and beauty entrepreneur
Kylie Jenner
(23) and the Norwegian tobacco heirs
Alexandra
(24) and
Katharina Andresen
(25).
"In some ways, it's crazy and surreal to be a part of going public here," said Austin Russell, impressed.
"It just makes a lot of sense in other ways."
Russell, who allegedly was already tinkering with supercomputers and optical-electronic systems at the age of 11, dropped out of his studies at Stanford University at the age of 19 and founded Luminar, which is now one of the great hopes for technology for the leap from driver assistance systems to fully autonomous Driving applies.
Contracts with Volvo, Daimler and Intel
At least that's how industrial partners like Volvo, who signed the first production contract for installing lidar sensors in cars in May, see it.
The vehicles are expected to hit the market from 2022.
In the meantime, Daimler and the robo-car specialist, which belongs to Intel, have also ordered Mobileye from Luminar for their autonomous trucks planned with the help of Waymo.
Volvo also supported the IPO.
The Silicon Valley investor and now Luminar major shareholder
Peter Thiel
(53), who specifically awarded scholarships to
dropouts in
order to promote technological breakthroughs, was there
from the beginning
.
One of the recipients was Austin Russell.
Thiel had reinforced his vision of developing the hardware and software of the lidar systems from scratch.
The result is not only extremely powerful technology - but above all a drastic reduction in costs, which makes it economical for vehicle manufacturers to use laser beams to measure distances and thus control their vehicles.
Luminar now sees itself as the market leader in this field, which should grow from five billion dollars in sales today to 150 billion dollars by 2030.
Several start-ups are vying for it, such as Velodyne, AEye or Aeva.
At the end of 2019, Volkswagen participated in Aeva as "the best lidar solution on the market".
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Russell on Nasdaq: Young man with a degree in wealth
Photo: Nasdaq Inc.
"For autonomous systems, I would say 100 percent, you need very powerful lidar capabilities," said Austin Russell.
"You have to be able to shine very far into the distance and understand all conceivable borderline cases."
Elon Musk doesn't even want to take the technology for free
Technology also has its critics.
Tesla rejects the use of laser beams and emphasizes that the autonomous control must only work with cameras.
Human drivers rely on their eyes, too, and that works pretty well.
In October, Tesla boss Elon Musk (49) etched that he would not even use lidar technology if it were free.
Luminar posted a loss of $ 94.7 million last year on sales of $ 12.6 million.
Meanwhile, the order book is well filled with 1.3 billion dollars, explained Russell.
He expects strong profit margins on every single product sold.
In order to avoid the risks of a conventional IPO, Luminar, like many companies in the meantime, chose the detour via the purchase of an already listed special purpose vehicle.
This with the name Gores Petropoulos has now been merged with Luminar under its own name (with the ticker symbol "LAZR").
Outside shareholders had no opportunity to join the company until Thursday.
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