Luminar sale approved despite last-minute mystery bid

Moments before a bankruptcy judge was expected to approve the sale of Luminar’s lidar business, an unidentified party submitted an offer that apparently blew away the leading bid of $33 million.

This bid, which emerged just before a hearing Tuesday, kicked off a series of rapid-fire meetings between Luminar’s remaining leadership team and its lawyers, a “special transaction committee” formed to navigate the bankruptcy, and eventually the company’s full board.

While the bid was “substantially higher,” there were “infirmities” in the offer, according to a lawyer for Luminar. The company ultimately decided to stick with the $33 million bid it received from MicroVision during an auction on Monday.

The identity of who submitted this long-shot offer was not revealed, but Luminar’s lawyer said it was an “insider purchaser,” meaning it likely came from company founder Austin Russell.

Russell had already tried to buy the company late last year before it slid into bankruptcy (and after he abruptly resigned as CEO). Representatives of his new firm Russell AI Labs previously told TechCrunch he was interested in submitting a bid on the lidar business during the bankruptcy case. (Those same representatives did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.)

The hearing moved forward, and the sale to MicroVision was approved. The sale of Luminar’s semiconductor division to a company called Quantum Computing Inc. was also approved.

The transactions are likely to close in the coming weeks, and after that, the company will cease to exist, bringing an end to one of the buzzier suppliers of the budding autonomous vehicle era.

What MicroVision wants

Russell’s goal of using lidar to help cars drive themselves will continue on at MicroVision, according to its CEO Glen DeVos. As part of the asset sale, MicroVision will get Luminar’s lidar tech as well as its remaining staff, and he said he’s hopeful some of the other talent that was laid off prior to bankruptcy will come on board, too.

For DeVos, Luminar’s lidar technology is the piece MicroVision has been missing from his company’s portfolio. The Redmond, Washington-based company doesn’t have the same profile as the leaders in the lidar sector like Aeva, Innoviz, Hesai, or Ouster, but that’s in part because it lacked the long-range sensing capability that is crucial to automotive.

MicroVision has a “very strong” software team, DeVos said in an interview with TechCrunch, and a similarly strong short-range lidar team. But DeVos, who spent a long career at automotive suppliers Delphi and Aptiv, and took over as MicroVision CEO last year, wants to expand beyond its current markets of industrial use, security, and defense.

“So when we look at the Luminar engineering team, and what they’ve done, we said: ‘Hey, that’s a great compliment from an engineering capability standpoint,’” Devos said. “That’s critical in this area in terms of trying to win automotive business.”

DeVos said he’s hopeful that MicroVision can take Luminar’s existing commercial engagements with automakers — even the ones in tatters, like the contract with Volvo — and use those as a springboard into automotive, which would represent a huge new pool of potential revenue for his company.

“I’ve been in the automotive industry a long time. I have experience where contractual relationships have gone off the rails, and basically, worked very hard to put those back together. We’re going to look at every single one of those. We’re not going to assume any of them are beyond saving,” he said. “You never want to get there, but, you know, there’s ways of putting those pieces back together.”

A second mystery bidder?

While the sale approval is behind him, Tuesday’s offer wasn’t the first time DeVos and MicroVision found themselves up against a mysterious bidder.

During the hearing, lawyers for Luminar and Rich Morgner, a managing director at Jeffries (which was helping run the sale process), revealed that another unidentified party was forming a bid as far back as January 12.

That bid was problematic from the jump, Morgner said. At first, the party’s financing was coming from a “Chinese national company.” When Luminar expressed concerns about regulatory approval, Morgner said the bidder replaced its funding with three different non-Chinese sources.

“One was family money, which we were ultimately able to verify. The second was an SPV under the Caymans, which had a brokerage statement showing a round number of funds. And then we also had a European family office that was also part of the financing syndicate,” he said.

While the lawyers and bankers were able to verify the “family money” was dependable, Morgner said the large round number in the Caymans SPV seemed suspicious.

“The concern was the money came in … [so] money could come out. It wasn’t like looking at a long, dated brokerage statement, where you could see the ebbs and flows in the various different securities,” he said. Proof of funds from the European family office source was also never provided.

Luminar’s lawyers never revealed the identity of the bidder, or whether it was the same party that submitted the offer that disrupted Tuesday’s hearing.