
They started branching out and the added a location in Colorado Springs by April 2018. Throughout the years, Luminar has partnered with numerous companies.īy 2018, they have been on their seventh-generation Application-specific integrated circuit design or ASIC which had been a fully integrated technology stack. Toyota decided to utilize Luminar devices in their platform 2.1 test vehicles which are a fleet of a self driving sedan. After a few months, Luminar announced they have formed a partnership with the research and development division of Toyota which focuses on autonomous vehicles, robotics and AI called Toyota Research Institute. With the said funding, they were able to produce 10,000 automotive lidar from their factory set up in Orlando.
#Austin russell lidar series
This has made their signal out of range for the visible light which made it safe for the human eyes at the higher power levels.Īfter five years of being in the stealth mode, Luminar decided to emerge from it and in April 2017 they have received $36 million in the series A funding.

Usually, lidar operates at 905 nanometers, however Luminar's lidar operates at 1,550 nanometers in the infrared range. Upon seeing his progress, Russell decided to reevaluate their standard in the operating wavelength for the lidar systems. He was able to increase the time provided by automotive lidar for the vehicle to be safely reactive to seven seconds at a highway speed. He was able to do this by fabricating lot components in-house rather than relying on the devices on the market. When Russell founded Luminar, his goal was to develop and make lidar technology with an improved resolution and range. They spent the next five years of the company on stealth mode. Shortly after he founded the company, Jason Eichenholz joined him in the company as his co-founder and chief technology officer.


He used to money to finally start his own company which led to the founding of Luminar Technologies.Īustin Russell was only 17 years old when he founded Luminar Technologies on 2012 in California.

As luck would have it, Russell was awarded prize money of $100,000 from the Thiel Fellowship of Peter Thiel which lead him to ultimately drop out of college since he believes that his time will be well spent outside university. Russell has spent the latter part of his teen years studying at the Irvine Beckman laser Institute in University of California but later enrolled at the Stanford University.ĭespite studying at one of the most prestigious colleges in the world, he claims that he learned most of his knowledge by watching YouTube videos and reading Wikipedia pages. When he turned thirteen years old, Russell decided to apply for his first ever patent for a product which is a recycling system that reuses the ground water from sprinklers. He is considered to be a prodigy at a very young age when he was able to memorize the periodic table of elements when he was only two years old. Aside from the fact that Austin Kingsley Russell was born on March 13, 1995, there is no more information about his parents and siblings. Austin Russell kept his life private and the public has very little knowledge about his life growing up.
