Moments before a bankruptcy judge was expected to approve the sale of Luminar’s lidar business, an unknown party submitted a bid that apparently blew away the top bid of $33 million.
That offer, which came just before a hearing on Tuesday, set off a series of rapid-fire meetings between Luminar’s remaining leadership team and its lawyers, a “special transaction committee” formed to deal with the bankruptcy and eventually the company’s full board.
While the bid was “substantially higher,” there were “weaknesses” in the bid, according to a lawyer for Luminar. The company ultimately decided to stick with the $33 million offer it received from MicroVision during an auction on Monday.
The identity of who made the long bid was not disclosed, but Luminar’s lawyer said it was an “insider buyer,” meaning it likely came from company founder Austin Russell.
Russell had already tried to buy the company late last year before it went bankrupt (and after he suddenly stepped down as CEO). Representatives of his new company Russell AI Labs previously told TechCrunch that he is interested in bidding for the lidar business during the bankruptcy case. (The same representatives did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.)
The hearing proceeded and the sale to MicroVision was approved. Also approved was the sale of Luminar’s semiconductor division to a company called Quantum Computing Inc.
The transaction is likely to close in the coming weeks, after which the company will cease to exist, ending one of the most popular suppliers of the nascent era of autonomous vehicles.
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What MicroVision wants
Russell’s goal of using lidar to help cars drive themselves will continue at MicroVision, according to CEO Glen DeVos. As part of the asset sale, MicroVision will acquire Luminar’s lidar technology as well as its remaining staff, and he said he hopes some of the other talent laid off before the bankruptcy will come on board.
For DeVos, Luminar’s lidar technology is the piece MicroVision was missing from his company’s portfolio. The Redmond, Washington-based company doesn’t have the same profile as lidar leaders like Aeva, Innoviz, Hesai or Ouster, but that’s partly because it lacked the long-range sensing capability critical to the automotive industry.
MicroVision has a “very strong” software team, DeVos said in an interview with TechCrunch, and a similarly strong short-range lidar team. But DeVos, who spent a long career at auto suppliers Delphi and Aptiv, and took over as CEO of MicroVision last year, wants to expand beyond the current industrial, security and defense markets.
“So when we look at the engineering team at Luminar and what they’ve done, we said, ‘Hey, that’s a great compliment in terms of engineering ability,'” Devos said. “That’s critical in this area in terms of trying to win over the automotive industry.”
DeVos said he’s optimistic that MicroVision can take Luminar’s existing commercial commitments with automakers — even broken ones like the Volvo contract — and use them as a springboard into the automotive industry, which would represent a huge new pool of potential revenue for his company.
“I’ve been in the auto industry a long time. I’ve had experience where contractual relationships have slipped away and basically, I’ve worked very hard to put them back together. We’re going to look at each one of them. We’re not going to assume any of them are beyond saving,” he said. “You never want to get there, but, you know, there are ways to put those pieces back together.”
A second mystery bidder?
While approval of the sale is behind him, Tuesday’s bid wasn’t the first time DeVos and MicroVision have faced off against a mystery bidder.
During the hearing, lawyers for Luminar and Rich Morgner, a managing director at Jeffries (who was helping with the sale process), revealed that another unknown party had been preparing an offer as early as January 12.
That offer was problematic from the jump, Morgner said. Initially, the party’s funding came from a “Chinese national corporation”. When Luminar raised concerns about regulatory approval, Morgner said the bidder replaced its financing with three different non-Chinese sources.
“One was family money, which we were eventually able to verify. The second was an SPV under the Caymans, which had a brokerage statement showing a round number of funds. And then we also had a European family office that was also part of the funding syndicate,” he said.
While lawyers and bankers were able to verify that the “family money” was reliable, Morgner said the large number of rounds in the Caymans SPV looked suspicious.
“The concern was that the money went in… [so] money could be made. It wasn’t like we were looking at a long, dated stock statement where you could see the ebbs and flows in the various different securities,” he said. Also, no proof of funds was ever provided from the source of the European family office.
Luminar’s lawyers never disclosed the identity of the bidder or whether it was the same party that submitted the bid that disrupted Tuesday’s hearing.
