The enthusiasm for high-tech companies to go public via SPAC has not faded. Aeva, a start-up company located in Silicon Valley, is about to go public on the US stock market, and its market value has just exceeded 2 billion US dollars. This company is mainly engaged in the research and development of sensors for autonomous driving enterprises, and their sensors can coordinate the interaction between lidar, camera and radar.
The company, headquartered in Mountain View, California, was founded by two former Apple engineers and is currently working with InterPrivate Acquisition Corp. The merger is expected to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in the first quarter of 2021 under the ticker symbol "AEVA".
The transaction will provide up to 343 million US dollars in total income, investors include Adage Capital and Porsche SE.
After Aeva goes public, previous investors including Lux Capital, Canaan Partners and Lockheed Martin will continue to hold shares in the company.
InterPrivate CEO Ahmed Fattouh said in an interview with a Forbes reporter: “We are skeptical about how many lidar companies there are currently. After the first meeting with Aeva’s team, we realized that this is a completely different business. , Aeva is a perceptual company that focuses on outside the automotive field. This team comes from Apple and has a good knowledge of various consumers, consumer health and industrial applications. It goes far beyond the automotive field. This really makes Aeva is different."
Lidar can provide very detailed 3D images, which makes it a key technology for autonomous vehicles to accurately observe the surrounding environment, but its cost is relatively high, and it brings seamless integration with digital cameras and radar robots used in automobiles Technical challenges.
Compared with the lidar industry giants Velodyne and Lumine, which are also listed through SPAC, Aeva positions its sensor as a "4D" system that integrates lidar functions into a single silicon chip, but it can still measure speed.
Aeva's system does not emit a laser beam to determine the distance and depth, but emits a continuous, low-power laser beam to measure the frequency change of the reflected wave of the object. Soroush Salehian, co-founder of Aeva, pointed out that this method provides better data than traditional lidar, and it does not interfere with other sensors.
He told reporters: "In fact, our measurement of speed is very similar to the function of radar. With speed data, the maximum range of each point or pixel we can get can reach 300 or 400. We accurate it to every second At the level of a few centimeters, this will fundamentally change the way you perceive your surroundings. It’s as if you changed from a black and white camera to a color camera. Everything about your understanding of the world has changed. When you have a new dimension of measurement Everything changed. This is exactly what we provide."
According to PitchBook, Aeva raised more than $100 million in funding before announcing its listing. The company estimates that through the sale of new shares and funds merged with InterPrivate, its valuation will reach approximately $2.1 billion.
Soroush Salehian said that so far, Aeva has reached a business partnership with Porsche and parts giant ZF, and there may be more deals to be disclosed soon. Aeva's revenue this year will be in the "single-digit million dollar" range, but with the start of the commercial supply agreement, it will rise to $800 million per year by 2025.
In 2019, Aeva cooperated with Audi's autonomous intelligent driving department to provide sensors for passenger cars, and this year it also formed a production alliance with parts manufacturer ZF.
Soroush Salehian said that the single unit of the Aeva sensor is slightly larger than a deck of playing cards and sells for "a few hundred dollars." Although automotive applications were the focus of Aeva's early focus, it increasingly hopes to cooperate with consumer technology and healthcare companies that require biometric data tools.
He told reporters: "We can measure the speed of centimeters per second while the vehicle is traveling hundreds of meters, but after the same chip-level technology has improved the processing power, it can be measured in a shorter distance. Speeds in the micron range. This means that the sensor can measure vibration."
For example, if you put an Aeva sensor on someone's skin. Aeva began to understand biometric technology through such a rumors, such as typical indicators such as heart rate, and perhaps more complex things such as arteriosclerosis over time.
This information comes from the sensor beam, not from a device connected to the body. Soroush Salehian said: "As far as I know, we are the only company that can provide this unique chip lidar technology, which can measure high-range performance and can be applied to consumers." But he did not Reveal Aeva's potential new partners.