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The lidar maker has been stuck in a legal fight with its former CEO, Austin Russell, and has gone through several rounds of layoffs.
The lidar maker has been stuck in a legal fight with its former CEO, Austin Russell, and has gone through several rounds of layoffs.
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Dec 15, 2025, 6:32 PM UTC
Image: Andrew J. Hawkins / The Verge
is transportation editor with 10+ years of experience who covers EVs, public transportation, and aviation. His work has appeared in The New York Daily News and City & State.
Luminar, the lidar manufacturer that rode a wave of self-driving car hype to land deals with major automakers like Volvo and Mercedes-Benz, filed for bankruptcy Monday. The company has been mired in a legal fight with its founder and former CEO, Austin Russell, who was ousted earlier this year following an ethics inquiry.
As part of its bankruptcy, Luminar is seeking permission to sell both its lidar and semiconductor businesses, the latter of which it has already agreed to sell to Quantum Computing for $110 million. The company plans to continue to operate during the bankruptcy proceedings “to minimize disruptions and maintain delivery of its LiDAR hardware and software.” That said, Luminar will cease to exist once the process is complete.
“As we navigate this process, our top priority is to continue delivering the same quality, reliability and service our customers have come to expect from us,” CEO Paul Ricci said in a statement.
After launching in 2017, Luminar muscled its way to the front of the autonomous vehicle industry as a top maker of lidar systems, a key technology that driverless cars use to sense the shapes and distances of objects around them. Luminar has sold sensors to Mercedes-Benz, Volvo, Audi, Toyota Research Institute, Caterpillar, and even Tesla, which has dismissed lidar sensors in favor of traditional cameras. The company was valued at nearly $3 billion when it went public through a reverse merger with a SPAC in 2020.
It’s been a rough couple of years for Luminar. In addition to Russell’s ouster, the company has been through several rounds of layoffs as it sought to restructure its workforce. Russell resurfaced earlier this year in an attempt to reclaim the company he lost by acquiring 100 percent of its Class A shares under the auspices of his new company, Russell AI Labs. This all led to Volvo announcing that it would be dropping Luminar lidar from its 2026 models due to limited supply of the hardware.
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