Autonomous vehicle technology company Velodyne Lidar has hired bankers for an IPO, according to sources familiar with the process.
Velodyne Lidar, which makes a laser technology that helps self-driving cars detect the objects around them, is working with Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, Royal Bank of Canada, and William Blair for a potential public float, the people said.
The company is looking to surpass its last private valuation of $1.8 billion and go public before the end of the year, one person said.
Though autonomous vehicle technology is in its early days, Velodyne Lidar traces its origins back to 1983, the founding year of its parent company, Velodyne Acoustics.
The company started making lidar technology around 2005, and then spun off from the audio division in 2016 with $150 million in financial backing from Ford and Baidu.
Velodyne closed $25 million funding round led by Japanese multinational Nikon at the end of 2018.
Going public would make Velodyne the first IPO in the emerging autonomous vehicle technology space.
The company’s plans come at a high-stakes moment for the autonomous vehicle sector. Self-driving cars are at the brink of commercial adoption but the space continues to face public set-backs, including a fatal accident in which one of Uber’s self-driving cars struck a pedestrian in March 2018.
Yet money continues to flow into the sector as competition grows between some of the biggest players, which include Google’s Waymo, Tesla, GM’s Cruise, and Intel/MobileEye.
GM’s self-driving car unit Cruise raised $1.15 billion in May from GM, the SoftBank Vision Fund, and Honda. That round valued Cruise at $19 billion.
In June, Apple reportedly bought self-driving car startup Drive.ai, an acquihire which gives the company access to more engineers from the AV world. Drive.ai was last valued at $200 million, according to PitchBook.
Quanergy Systems, one of Velodyne’s biggest competitors, previously spoke to banks about going public though by August 2018 it had put those plans on hold, Bloomberg reported.
Quanergy and Velodyne are engaged in a patent dispute over a Velodyne patent for a “high definition lidar system.” The US Patent Trial and Appeals Board upheld Velodyne’s patent at the end of May, though Quanergy has since said it plans to appeal that ruling.
Velodyne, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and Citigroup declined to comment. Royal Bank of Canada and William Blair did not respond to a request for comment.