Luminar bids $22 million to bidders for its lidar business

Luminar has reached an agreement to sell its lidar business to a company called Quantum Computing Inc. for just $22 million unless he receives better offers by the 5:00 p.m. deadline. CT on Monday.

The lidar-maker, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in December, already announced plans to sell its semiconductor subsidiary to Quantum Computing Inc. for $110 million. The deals must be approved by a bankruptcy judge in the Southern District of Texas before they can be finalized.

Luminar founder and former CEO Austin Russell has expressed interest in bidding for the lidar assets and tried to buy the entire company in October, before it filed for bankruptcy. The company is currently trying to subpoena him for information stored on his cellphone as Luminar evaluates whether to file legal claims against him in connection with the board’s ethics investigation that led to his resignation last May. It is not known how many other bids Luminar may receive by Monday’s deadline.

Quantum Computing Inc. it has been defined as “stalking horse bidding”, which helps establish a baseline of asset value and helps avoid low ball bidding. Luminar has said it wants to move quickly through the bankruptcy case as its biggest creditors — mainly financial institutions that have lent money to the company in recent years — help finance the process.

Even if Luminar receives a higher bid, the stalking horse bid represents a monumental drop from the company top market cap in 2021, when it was worth about $11 billion. That valuation was supported by the promise that Luminar’s lidar sensors were to be widely adopted by major automakers like Volvo, which at one point planned to buy more than 1 million of them before finally pulling out of the deal in 2025. And other deals with Mercedes-Benz and Polestar collapsed along the way.

Quantum Computing Inc. founded in 2001 as a company called Ticketcart that sold ink cartridges, according to his records with the Capital Market Commission. It bought a drinks company in 2007, went through its own restructuring process 10 years later and turned to making optical technology for the nascent world of quantum computing. The company raised more than $700 million with the sale of shares in 2025although its revenue for the first nine months of last year was just $384,000.