GMHI Stock is a way to play the future of automobiles. The SPAC is merging with Luminar technologies. Early facebook investor, Peter Thiel who turned his 100k investment in Facebook to 3 billion dollars is betting on the company that will be providing the Lidar sensors and software to autonomous vehicles.
Luminar Technologies, an autonomous vehicle sensor and software company, delivers lidar sensors and software to enable autonomous consumer vehicles and trucking for volume production. Gores Metropoulos Inc., a special purpose acquisition company, agreed to acquire and combine with Luminar Technologies Inc. The ticker symbol is GMHI.
Luminar will be traded on the Nasdaq under the ticker LAZR.
Peter Thiel investment in Luminar
Luminar was founded in 2012 by CEO Austin Russell, a Stanford University dropout. The company is the leading autonomous vehicle and lidar technology company for consumer cars and trucking. Luminar is partnered with 7 of the top 10 global automakers and is set to power the introduction of highway self driving and next-generation safety systems.
Over 350 people strong, Luminar has built a new type of lidar from the chip-level up with breakthroughs across all core components. As a result, Luminar has created the only lidar sensor that meets the stringent performance, safety and cost requirements for Level 3–Level 5 autonomous vehicles. Meeting this requirement will accelerate the widespread adoption with automakers.
Luminar’s backers include Peter Thiel, who awarded a then-17-year-old Russell a fellowship to help start the firm, and GoPro Inc. founder Nick Woodman.
Samsung engineers join Luminar
Luminar announced that it has hired 16 people who worked on Samsung’s now dissolved DRVLINE team. Samsung once described the DRVLINE platform as an “open, modular, and scalable hardware and software-based platform” for the autonomous driving market.
SPAC Merger details
GMHI Stock Merger Transaction details
- Pro forma implied enterprise value of approximately $2.9 billion and market capitalization of approximately $3.4 billion.
- Transaction includes $400 million of cash from Gores Metropoulos and an immediate $170 million financing into Luminar, anchored by top tier institutional investors including Peter Thiel himself.
- The deal is set to complete in the fourth quarter.
GMHI Stock Share count
- Luminar’s stockholders will receive approximately 271.8 million shares of Gores Metropoulos common stock at closing.
- 50 million shares by common shareholders
- 17 million shares held by the PIPE financiers.
- Founder will own 12 million shares.
Bull case
In 2018, Volvo made a “strategic investment” in Luminar Technologies. Volvo is announcing that new LIDAR-equipped cars will start rolling off the production line in 2022. This is a different approach to LIDAR. Most companies were looking to roll LIDAR in robotaxis to offset the cost of LIDAR equipment. But robotaxis may not see the light of the day until 2030.
Volvo is taking a different approach here by limiting the operational domain to just highways. Particular stretches of highways will be controlled and verified extensively and the “Highway Pilot” will be used on those stretches.
Cheap price of the LIDAR system
At first, it will cost extra, though Volvo had no details to release on that front. LIDAR can be incredibly expensive — the rooftop versions sold by industry leader Velodyne can cost as much as $75,000 — but Luminar has said it is aiming to reduce the cost to as little as $500 a unit for ADAS applications and around $1,000 a unit for autonomous applications.
Conclusion
This makes it a very interesting play among the future of Autonomous vehicles. Velodyne is another public company that is offering LIDAR systems and it will be interesting to see who the winner will be.