* Luminar, which makes sensors for autonomous vehicles, said Monday it was selling itself in a deal valued at $3.4 billion via a SPAC merger with Gores Metropoulos. Volvo and the tech mogul Peter Thiel are also chipping in.
* The deal means that Luminar will become a public company trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol LAZR.
* Luminar makes lidar sensors, which bounce lasers off objects to help self-driving cars sense their surroundings, at much cheaper rates than many of its competitors.
* The founder and CEO of Luminar is Austin Russell, a 25-year-old who founded the startup in 2012 while in high school.
* Russell attended Stanford to study physics but dropped out at 18 after winning a Thiel Fellowship to build Luminar.
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Luminar, a self-driving-car startup founded by CEO Austin Russell at the age of 17 while he was in high school, said Monday it would go public in a $3.4 billion merger with a special purpose acquisition company.
"Eight years ago, we took on a problem to which most thought there would be no technically or commercially viable solution," Russell said in a press release, referring to building a less-expensive but safer system for self-driving cars known as lidar. "We worked relentlessly to build the tech from the ground up to solve it and partnered directly with the leading global automakers to show the world what's possible."
Luminar, which makes cheap laser-guidance systems for self-driving cars, has a "definitive agreement" to merge with Gores Metropoulos, a special purpose acquisition company connected to the investment firm Gores Group, the companies said. Gores will pay $400 million to make the deal happen, and the venture capitalist Peter Thiel, Volvo's venture-capital fund, and a handful of other investors are chipping in an additional $170 million to buy stakes in the company. Once the deal closes, Luminar will become a public company, trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol LAZR.
Volvo announced in May that it would begin using Luminar's laser-sensor technology in its cars in 2022.
Luminar has made a name for itself in the autonomous-vehicle market by bringing down the cost of its lidar sensors, which bounce lasers off objects to allow self-driving cars to "see" where they are. It's a popular method for self-driving cars and typically expensive.
In 2019, Luminar introduced a $500 system, relatively thrifty for lidar's niche market, where prices can reach tens of thousands of dollars.
Russell's rise has been rapid. Now 25, he founded Luminar to pursue his interest in lidar at 17 while still in high school. He attended Stanford to study physics but left at 18 after winning a Thiel Fellowship, which is Thiel's startup accelerator that pays students to drop out of school and build a startup for two years.
"Dropping out is definitely right for some people and can work really well if you're very clear on what you want to do and how you want to go about doing it, and clear about just life goals in general," Russell told CNBC in 2018.
SEE ALSO: Amazon's $1.2 billion deal to buy Zoox shows just how hard building a self-driving car still is —and why even more startups could become buyout targets
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