Lidar is one of the hottest new technologies for smart infrastructure and next-generation car safety and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). With over two million car accidents a year in the US, the need for such groundbreaking technology is urgent.
Lidar is an acronym for Light Detection and Ranging — a clever method used to accurately measure distances and dimensions of objects using light.
In 2016, Dr Jun Pei, a serial entrepreneur and technologist [FL1] with a PhD from Stanford University, and Dr Mark McCord, who has served as an associate professor at Stanford, co-founded Cepton Inc (NASDAQ:CPTN) to create reliable, low-cost lidars to serve as safety sensors.
The San Jose, California-based company now has a humming center of excellence in Troy, Michigan to support its automotive customers in the US car capital of Detroit.
Cepton lidars bounce lasers off surrounding objects to “see” the world in 3-D. Light has a constant speed of travel, and by measuring the time between when the light is transmitted from the source and when it is detected by the receiver (time of flight, or TOF), it can accurately measure the distance (range) of the object from the lidar.
The Silicon Valley innovator has attracted top-drawer talent.
“As the head of Electronics and Automotive Technology coverage at RBC Capital Markets I pretty much knew all the lidar companies in the space. But I felt Cepton had the best proposition in terms of popularizing and driving the adoption of lidar for the mass market,” Cepton CFO Hull Xu told Proactive.
“I was also drawn to the company’s mission to save lives as Cepton lidars play a pivotal role in reducing accident rates," he added.
Xu, an electrical engineer from Stanford University with an MBA from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, left RBC in 2021 to join Cepton.
Micro Motion Technology advantage
Cepton has a technology advantage when it comes to mass-market deployment — namely, performance, reliability, and cost. This has everything to do with the company’s novel lidar scanning technology.
“There are three primary components of a lidar sensor — transmission through the laser, detection of the light through the receiver and the scanner. We focused on one pillar of the lidar design which is the scanner,” said Xu.
“We focused on the scanning mechanism, and we came up with this new mirrorless, rotation-free and frictionless method called Micro Motion Technology (MMT).”
As an intelligent 3D-sensing solutions provider, Cepton develops lidar sensors for automotive and smart infrastructure markets using its unique MMT imaging approach enabling scanning of environments without any mirrors, or rotating or friction components, creating a low-cost, high-resolution perception device.
Mirror-based scanning approaches offset some challenges of rotational devices but can introduce optical inefficiencies, reliability, and cost implications.
“Our MMT method could offer a more balanced option,” said Xu, while noting that it uses low-cost materials with high reliability and performance.
Cepton lidar sensors are able to catch reflections from other cars more than 200 meters away.
Key relationship with Koito
Cepton developed an early relationship with Japanese lighting supplier Koito Manufacturing Co., Ltd. and they have been a major investor in the company.
“Koito is a strategic investor. They invested in Cepton on three separate occasions for a total of $200 million. The most recent investment was closed in January for $100 million,” noted Xu.
In January this year, Cepton closed the previously announced 100 million preferred stock investment to deepen its partnership with Koito, its long-term automotive Tier 1 partner and shareholder.
General Motors
As a Silicon Valley innovator Cepton has a strong track record of commercial success. As a direct result of its partnership, Cepton and Koito were awarded the industry’s largest known ADAS lidar series production award.
General Motors (GM) will tap Cepton lidars for its next-generation ADAS program, the GM Ultra Cruise. Starting in 2023, the Detroit car giant is planning to start installing Cepton-based lidar sensors across multiple brands in as many as nine different models to start the Ultra Cruise deployment. Ultra Cruise will eventually replace GM’s current ADAS offering, the Super Cruise, that saw deployment in 2018 and is currently offered in 22 car models.
“Koito is acting as a Tier 1 supplier, and we are acting as the Tier 2 supplier where we provide key hardware components and software that we sell to Koito; Koito then do the final assembly test and calibration. And the lidar units are then shipped to GM,” said Xu.
“Importantly, GM validated Cepton’s technology at a pretty early stage as we received the award at the end of 2019.”
Working with Ford
In addition to GM, Cepton has been working with Ford almost since its inception in 2016, supplying lidar sensors for ADAS research and development (R&D) and smart city projects.
Based on Ford’s guidance, Cepton delivered a custom version of its lidar to enable R&D on advanced ADAS features, said the company.
Robust revenue
Cepton expects to clock up between $15 million to $20 million in full year revenue in 2023.
“We are reasonably comfortable that we will be able to hit those numbers and achieve our full year guidance,” said Xu.
Lidar technologies that will be viable for the mass market over the next decade have to be low-cost and use components with proven reliability to support high-volume deployment.
“Cepton lidars tick the right boxes when it comes to high-performance matched with low-cost. Cepton is only one of three public lidar companies that has a major automotive series production award outside of China. We’re really at an inflection point as global top-10 OEMs have all decided to incorporate lidar in their next platform of vehicles,” said Xu.
“I really do think that when our lidars start to show up in cars, in GM vehicles, first of all at the end of 2023, and then 2024 and 2025 people will start to see the value proposition and we will break out from the pack.”
Cepton says the current award has an estimated value of over $1 billion. Moreover, the lidar solution provider has also won a multi-million dollar sales contract from one of the largest highway tolling system operators in the US.
Significantly, Cepton recently made a splash at the tech industry 'CES 2023' trade fair by unveiling its award-winning Vista-X120 Plus, the world’s slimmest software definable, top-end wide-angle automotive lidar for real-time adaptive 3D perception.
“It drastically elevates lidar performance without compromising reliability, size, power efficiency and cost,” noted Xu.
Written by Uttara Choudhury