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(Reuters) – Automotive sensor start-up Luminar Technologies Inc said Monday that it would be listed through a merger with the special purposes acquisition company Gores Metropoulos Inc., with a commercial price of about $2.9 billion.
The deal includes $400 million in Gores Metropoulos money and $170 million in investor financing, adding generation billionaire Peter Thiel, GoPro Inc. founder Nick Woodman, Volvo Cars Tech Fund and VectoIQ, the company that helped Nikola Corp publicly approve a SPAC, also known as a blank corporate check. This gives The Luminar agreement a total price of $3.4 billion.
Luminar manufactures sensors and lidar software for vehicles. Lidar sensors, which use soft laser pulses to take accurate photographs of the car’s surroundings, are essential in many automakers to allow higher degrees of driving force assistance to the point of making them able to drive automatically.
“The point of certainty you can offer as a component of an IPO procedure is very valuable,” Luminar Ceo Austin Russell said in an interview about the SPAC deal. He cited the Gores Group’s trajectory, having already concluded 3 SPAC agreements and their generation and automotive trajectory.
The combined company will retain the so-called Luminar Technologies Inc. and be indexed on the Nasdaq with the symbol “LAZR”.
The deal is expected to reach the fourth quarter.
“Luminar represents a rare opportunity to invest in the leader in autonomous driving generation for cars and trucks,” Alec Gores, CEO of Gores Metropoulos, said in a statement. You will be registered with the Luminar Board of Directors.
Deutsche Bank Securities is the monetary advisor to Gores, while GCA Advisors LLC and Jefferies Group LLC advise Luminar.
The white check company’s shares rose by about 26% in pre-market operations.
In May, Volvo Cars reached an agreement with The Silicon Valley-based startup to integrate its generation into its new platform starting in 2022. Volvo Cars, owned by Chinese company Geely Holding [GEELY. UL], took a stake in Luminar in 2018.
(Report through Sanjana Shivdas in Bengaluru and Ben Klayman in Detroit; edited through Sriraj Kalluvila and Chizu Nomiyama)