Velodyne Lidar

History

David Hall founded Velodyne in 1983 as an audio company specializing in subwoofer technology. Velodyne's experience with laser-based distance measurement began in 2005, when David Hall and his brother Bruce (then president of Velodyne) entered a vehicle in the DARPA Grand Challenge, a driverless car race sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The experience highlighted shortcomings in camera-centric approaches and in existing lidar technology, which only scanned a single fixed line of sight. Velodyne developed new multi-laser sensors for the 2007 race. The Hall brothers sold their lidar system as a steering input to five of the six teams that finished the 2007 challenge. The system rotated 64 lasers and measured the time of flight of each beam to calculate distances to surrounding objects, creating a 360-degree 3D map of the environment. The new system produced about one million data points per second, compared to 5,000 data points per second for earlier systems.

In 2011, Velodyne donated one of its early prototype sensors to the Robotics Collection at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History.

In 2016, Velodyne’s lidar division was spun off from Velodyne Acoustics as Velodyne Lidar, Inc. On August 16, 2016, Velodyne announced a $150 million investment from Ford and Baidu. In 2017, Velodyne opened a "megafactory" in San Jose, California, to increase production capacity. The company also established an R&D center in Alameda, California. That same year, Velodyne sponsored the SAE/GM AutoDrive Challenge, a three-year autonomous vehicle competition for university teams, by providing its sensors.

Since 2018, Velodyne has partnered with Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) in a campaign promoting autonomous vehicles for improved roadway safety and the prevention of impaired driving. Since October 2018, Velodyne has organized an annual "World Safety Summit on Autonomous Technology". Also in 2018, the company signed agreements to collaborate with Nikon and Veoneer on manufacturing and mass production of lidar systems.

In July 2019, Velodyne acquired mapping and localization software assets from Mapper.ai to bolster its software capabilities. In January 2020, David Hall stepped down as CEO and was succeeded by Anand Gopalan, the former CTO, although Hall initially remained as chairman of the board and the company's largest shareholder. On July 2, 2020, Velodyne Lidar merged with Graf Industrial Corp., a special-purpose acquisition company, to become a publicly traded company. In September 2020, Velodyne began trading on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbols VLDR and VLDRW.