Velodyne Lidar
LidarUSA
New to Unitard
🤝 Acquired
Peak $1.8 BillionToday
~-90%
from peak
- 🦄Became a unicorn2020
- 📈Peak valuation$1.8 Billion ’20
- 💔Became a Unitard2022
- 💸Last valuation~$180M
Current status
Merged with Ouster (2023) below $1B
The rise & fall
7 moments · 1983–2023The key moments, with employee sentiment along the way.
1983
1983
Founded as a subwoofer company
David Hall's Velodyne Acoustics builds audio gear for decades — until his spinning lidar rig steals the show at the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge.
Wikipedia
2016
2016
Ford and Baidu write a $150M check
The autonomous-vehicle gold rush makes Velodyne's spinning sensor the industry standard.
TechCrunch
Sep 2020
Sep 2020
SPAC debut: $1.8B, unicorn on arrival$1.8B
Merges with Graf Industries to become the first public lidar company.
CNBC
2021
2021
Boardroom melee
Founder David Hall and the board fall out publicly; the CEO departs and strategy lurches.
Reuters
2022
2022
Slips out of the club
Commercial adoption lags, losses mount, and the shares sink toward $1.
Macrotrends
2021–23
From the inside · Glassdoor reviews, 2021–23
Glassdoor reviews echoed the turmoil at the top: employees described repeated CEO changes and shifting strategy, and many reviewers experienced the Ouster deal as an absorption rather than a combination, with much of the staff not retained through the 2023 layoffs.
Feb 2023
Feb 2023
Merges into Ouster — below $1B combined
An all-stock "merger of equals" with its lidar rival, at a combined value roughly 90% below the SPAC-era peak.
Businesswire
💬 entries paraphrase anonymous, unverified reviews posted publicly on Glassdoor ↗; dated facts carry their source.
How it happened
Velodyne Lidar was an early leader in lidar sensors for autonomous vehicles, going public via SPAC in 2020 at a valuation around $1.8B. Weak commercial adoption, mounting losses, and boardroom turmoil eroded its value, and in 2023 it merged with rival Ouster in an all-stock deal at a combined valuation well below $1B (~-90% from peak).
Source: Businesswire; Ouster merger of equals, Feb 2023
Founder
- David Hallfounder & CEO (until 2020)No public profile matched
