News Summary

• Our main challenge will be whether these AV teams can effectively generate value for their end users and effectively make use of millimeter wave radar, which is a field that few are familiar with,” he noted.Amid merger and bankruptcy in the West, lidar maker Hesai nails $190M IPO
• The participation of Li, the founder and CEO of Hesai, a major lidar maker that racked up $190 million in an IPO in February, seems surprising at first given the battle between radar and lidar to win the AV clients.
• But as we progress into the second half of the competition, the focus shifts towards generating tangible value,” suggested Niu.Altos’s automotive radar, according to Niu, is superior to lidar on several fronts.
• “Almost all of them can be improved,” said Niu, but they are “design choices” and the improvement of some could lead to compromised capabilities in others.Given all these benefits of radar, including its affordability at a fraction of lidar’s costs, why hasn’t it been widely adopted in AVs?
• In a pre-recorded demo (below), Niu showed that the startup’s radar is able to generate “point cloud” data, which is real-time, high-resolution representations of moving objects, a capability for which lidar is known.
• At a closer look, however, the investment indicates an interesting new development in the arena of automotive perception.Lidar, which uses light to measure distances between objects, is currently considered more robust than radar in providing high-resolution, three-dimensional mapping.