{"id":154416,"date":"2023-01-05T02:23:52","date_gmt":"2023-01-05T08:23:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/01\/what-luminars-acquisition-of-startup-civil-maps-means-for-its-lidar-future"},"modified":"2023-01-05T02:23:52","modified_gmt":"2023-01-05T08:23:52","slug":"what-luminars-acquisition-of-startup-civil-maps-means-for-its-lidar-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/01\/what-luminars-acquisition-of-startup-civil-maps-means-for-its-lidar-future","title":{"rendered":"What Luminar\u2019s acquisition of startup Civil Maps means for its lidar future"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/what-luminars-acquisition-of-startup-civil-maps-means-for-its-lidar-future2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>As lidar company Luminar pushed ahead to meet its goals for 2022 \u2014 milestones that included locking in new commercial contracts with unnamed automakers and shipping production-ready sensors to SAIC \u2014 it also snapped up a small HD mapping startup called <a href=\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2017\/05\/30\/this-is-how-a-self-driving-car-sees-the-road\/\">Civil Maps<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The acquisition, which was disclosed Wednesday during Luminar founder and CEO Austin Russell\u2019s presentation at <a href=\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/tag\/ces\/\">CES 2023<\/a>, is more than just a large publicly traded company taking advantage of a consolidating industry. Although the timing couldn\u2019t have been better due to the current economic environment, according to Russell.<\/p>\n<p>For Russell, the acquisition is part of <a href=\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2022\/05\/20\/luminars-austin-russell-we-probably-shouldnt-have-existed-but-lidar-will-drive-next-gen-safety-anyway\/\">Luminar\u2019s longer term vision<\/a> to be more than just a lidar supplier. Mapping, specifically the mapping tech that Civil Maps created, is foundational to that goal, Russell said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As lidar company Luminar pushed ahead to meet its goals for 2022 \u2014 milestones that included locking in new commercial contracts with unnamed automakers and shipping production-ready sensors to SAIC \u2014 it also snapped up a small HD mapping startup called Civil Maps. The acquisition, which was disclosed Wednesday during Luminar founder and CEO Austin [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,1965,1491],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-154416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-mapping","category-transportation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=154416"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154416\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=154416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=154416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=154416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}