Ouster, Inc. (Ouster) provides lidar sensors and solutions for the automotive, industrial, robotics, and smart infrastructure industries.
Ouster’s products include high-resolution scanning and solid-state digital lidar sensors, analog lidar sensors, and software solutions. The company anticipates that 3D vision technologies, coupled with artificial intelligence, will power autonomy that in turn will fundamentally disrupt business models across many existing industries and enable entirely new in...
Ouster, Inc. (Ouster) provides lidar sensors and solutions for the automotive, industrial, robotics, and smart infrastructure industries.
Ouster’s products include high-resolution scanning and solid-state digital lidar sensors, analog lidar sensors, and software solutions. The company anticipates that 3D vision technologies, coupled with artificial intelligence, will power autonomy that in turn will fundamentally disrupt business models across many existing industries and enable entirely new industries and capabilities.
The company’s four target markets each have unique use cases for its lidar sensors:
Automotive: The company works with companies across the entire automotive ecosystem, from technology providers to direct automotive parts suppliers and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), to design and manufacture lidar sensors for these advanced vehicle systems.
Industrial: The company’s industrial customers use its lidar sensors to increase safety and automate operations across the global supply chain. This includes material handling vehicles at ports and warehouses, off-highway vehicles in mines and on farms, and manufacturing equipment in factories.
Robotics: The company’s robotics customers are pioneering an automated future that can affect many aspects of its daily lives as they take on tasks that are redundant, cumbersome, expensive or dangerous for humans.
Smart infrastructure: The company’s smart infrastructure customers are in both the public and private sectors. Cities are prioritizing safety and efficiency through the use of lidar technology on roads and sidewalks in public spaces. Security companies are also looking to improve intrusion detection and tracking by augmenting existing closed-circuit television (CCTV) systems with the spatial tracking capabilities of lidar.
The company envisions a future where its digital technology enables lidar to become universal, empowering 3D perception capabilities within robots, cars, trucks, and drones, as well as factories, warehouses, roads, sidewalks, public spaces, retail stores, stadiums, docks, and airport terminals.
The company's main manufacturing partners are Benchmark Electronics, Inc. (Benchmark) and Fabrinet. Benchmark and Fabrinet manufacture the majority of its products, which the company expects will reduce its product costs and allow it to rapidly scale production to meet anticipated product demand.
Intellectual Property
The company has proprietary intellectual property for both its digital and analog products and solutions, including in its software, real-time 3D vision for autonomous systems, manufacturing processes and calibration methodology. The company has also filed patents and trademark applications in order to further secure these rights and strengthen its ability to defend against third parties who may infringe on the company’s rights.
Patented Digital Lidar Architecture
The company's patents contain a broad range of claims related to devices and methods for implementing digital lidar, among other things. Its patents cover micro-optic technology that enables improved digital lidar performance; digital lidar architecture combining vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSEL) and single photon avalanche diodes (SPAD); its data processing circuits for in-silicon digital signal processing; and the company’s lidar-camera convergence, combining active and passive sensing technologies.
Custom System-on-a-Chip (SoC) with SPAD Detectors
The company’s sensors contain a custom-designed SoC that replaces the functionality of hundreds of discrete analog components and integrates those capabilities onto a single complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) chip.
In the company's Ouster Sensor (OS) product line, it is on its L3 generation of SoC, which combines significant processing power with a 128-channel SPAD array onto a single piece of silicon and powers all of its REV7 products. Its SoC is capable of counting individual photons in order to detect very weak laser light pulses from long-range targets. This digital SPAD-based approach enables the company's OS sensors to be compact, high-performance, and low-cost, providing advanced autonomy functionality to its industrial, robotics, smart infrastructure, and automotive customers.
The company's Digital Flash (DF) lidar is under development and utilizes its first generation CMOS SoC for solid-state sensors. In 2021, it announced its second generation DF SoC, ‘Chronos.’ Powered by this chip, the solid-state DF lidar features short, medium, and long-range sensing.
Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Laser Array
Paired with the company's digital SPAD SoC is an array of VCSELs. By using VCSEL technology, it can place its laser emitters into a dense array. This dense, compact approach enables the company to increase its resolution without increasing the size or complexity of its sensors.
Patented Micro-Optical System
In addition to the company's detector SoC and VCSEL array, its sensors feature patented micro-optical systems that enhance the performance of both its emitters and detectors. The combined effect of these micro-optical systems on sensor performance is equivalent to an increase in detector efficiency of multiple orders of magnitude.
Product Portfolio
Using an array of eye-safe lasers, the company's lidar solutions measure distances in the environment at the speed of light. Unlike camera-based solutions, lidar solutions allow machines to see in 3D by providing precise distance measurements of surrounding objects. Lidar also performs better than cameras in low light conditions and produces fewer errors. Compared to radar, lidar provides better resolution, perceiving objects’ shapes for superior object detection and classification. Lidar systems are designed to detect pedestrians equally well during daytime and nighttime conditions because the systems provide self-illumination by means of laser beams.
In October of 2021, Ouster acquired Sense Photonics, Inc. (Sense) a developer of solid-state flash lidar based on VCSEL and SPAD technology. This acquisition has supported the development of the company’s DF sensor which leverages technology and engineering expertise from both companies. In February 2023, Ouster completed the merger (the Velodyne Merger) with Velodyne Lidar, Inc. (Velodyne) pursuant to the terms of the Agreement and Plan of Merger, dated as of November 4, 2022.
OS Product Line
Introduced in 2018, the OS product line is available in four different models to meet the needs of the company’s end customers. The model options include the hemispheric field of view ‘OSDome’, the ultra-wide view ‘OS0,’ the mid-range ‘OS1,’ and the long-range ‘OS2.’ Within each of these models, it offers numerous configuration options, including but not limited to different resolutions, connection standards, and data output structures. As the company continues to release new generations of the silicon CMOS SoCs that power the OS product line, it expects the performance of its sensors to improve.
In 2022, the company launched its REV7 OS series scanning sensors powered by the company’s L3 chip. Compared to its earlier generation sensors, REV7 delivers double the range, enhanced object detection, increased precision and accuracy, and greater reliability.
DF Series
The DF series is a suite of short, mid, and long-range solid-state digital lidar sensors with superior reliability, durability, and affordability. The DF series is designed to meet automaker requirements and certifications for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving, while seamlessly integrating into the vehicle architecture and design. The DF series is also suitable for non-ADAS use cases where a full 360-degree field of view is not required. Its key features include high resolution, adaptability, and scalability.
High resolution: The patented breakthrough solid-state digital flash architecture produces high-resolution 3D point clouds.
Adaptability: The multi-sensor suite is a flexible platform that can be easily adapted to different form-factors and sensor configurations to provide varying ranges, fields of view, and vehicle design freedoms – all with a simple change in optics or housing.
Scalability: The solid-state DF series is designed to be highly manufacturable and to offer durability, reliability, and affordability.
Velodyne Product Lines
The company also offers certain surround-view lidar sensors that Velodyne previously marketed prior to the Velodyne Merger. These scanning lidar products include the VLP-16, VLP-16 Lite, VLP-16 Hi-Res, VLP-32, and VLS-128, and are in the final stages of their product lifecycle. The company plans to stop manufacturing these products in 2025.
Ouster Gemini
Ouster Gemini is a perception platform designed for smart infrastructure deployments like security and crowd analytics and is optimized exclusively for Ouster’s digital lidar sensors. The Gemini platform consists of OS series lidar sensors, edge processor hardware, perception software, and cloud analytics.
The Ouster Gemini platform provides people and object detection, classification, and tracking for actionable, intuitive, and customizable insights while preserving personally identifiable information. Gemini enables its customers to detect, classify, and track objects through a covered area which can be expanded by meshing lidar sensors together to form a single, cohesive 3D view. This approach has multiple advantages compared to other similar solutions and can be used to replace or enhance existing camera, radar, or RF beacon-based systems:
Detection accuracy: Gemini perception software is specifically optimized to take advantage of the rich and robust data provided by Ouster’s digital lidar sensors. The high resolution and improved range of its digital lidar sensors combined with a state-of-the-art deep neural network based perception algorithms enhance the detection, classification, and tracking accuracy of the perception software.
Uninterrupted tracking: Gemini enables seamless tracking of objects across an entire area. Users can easily mesh multiple lidar sensors together within the Gemini software interface, allowing a seamless 3D view of object movement throughout the space.
Easy setup and administration: The simplicity of the Gemini platform, along with its intuitive user interface, enables customers to install, configure, and maintain the system with ease.
Privacy-preserving: Gemini does not output any personally identifiable information, allowing customers to deploy advanced monitoring systems in public or sensitive areas without privacy concerns.
BlueCity
BlueCity is a Gemini-powered solution for traffic operations, planning, and safety. BlueCity provides real-time data analytics and predictions, which can be used to improve traffic and crowd flow efficiency, improve urban planning, advance sustainability, and protect vulnerable road users in a wide range of weather and lighting conditions.
Improve Flow Efficiency: Connecting BlueCity’s intelligent solution to existing traffic controllers helps optimize signal timing and traffic and crowd flow based on real-time, multimodal traffic data. This can result in reduced traffic congestion, decreased vehicle delays, and maximized system capacity.
Improve Urban Planning: BlueCity can help improve mobility and urban growth management for all modes of transport with data-based decision-making insights on the volume, speed, and direction of pedestrians, cyclists, and vehicles.
Data Analytics Dashboard: BlueCity provides a user dashboard with actionable insights such as number of near misses, pedestrian crossing time estimates, illegal turn detection, and red-light violations.
Customers
The company targets four markets globally: automotive, industrial, robotics, and smart infrastructure. For the year ended December 31, 2024, one customer accounted for more than 10% of its revenue from product sales.
Automotive
The company's customers in the automotive industry fall into two categories: customers developing various forms of self-driving technology for driverless mobility and freight applications, and customers developing consumer ADAS. Both groups are generally engaged in the design, production, manufacture, operation, or aftermarket modification of automobiles, which includes consumer and commercial vehicles, commercial heavy trucks, and buses, among other vehicles. Automotive customers use lidar as a core component in ADAS and for autonomous driving.
Industrial Automation
The company’s customers in the industrial market are generally engaged in the manufacturing, operation, or after-market modification of heavy industrial machinery, which includes automated guided vehicles (‘AGVs’), autonomous mobile robots (‘AMRs’), mining vehicles, large material handling vehicles such as forklifts, construction vehicles, agricultural vehicles, and port machinery among other machines. Lidar is used on heavy machinery to enable autonomous usage of the machinery and to improve worker safety.
Robotics
The company's customers in the robotics industry are generally engaged in the design, production, operation, or aftermarket modification of small mobile human-less vehicles, which include wheeled robots, legged robots, and drones, among other vehicles. Its customers in the robotics market include both commercial entities and nonprofit entities, such as research institutions. The company's customers in the robotics market are installing lidar sensors for autonomous navigation, collision avoidance, and mapping in order to provide services such as last-mile delivery, street sweeping, and asset inspection.
Smart Infrastructure
The company's customers in the smart infrastructure market are generally engaged in monitoring and analyzing human and vehicle movements for the purpose of providing building security and improving roadway safety and efficiency. This market includes federal, state, and local governments, as well as private commercial businesses. Unlike traditional cameras, the company's lidar sensors provide accurate spatial data in low lighting conditions while safeguarding privacy concerns. Its lidar sensors and software solutions provide smart infrastructure customers the ability to detect, classify, and track people and vehicles through an easy-to-use software user interface, allowing them to interact with lidar data indirectly and in a task-relevant manner.
Growth Strategies
The company’s growth strategy is based upon three components: the attractive performance and cost economics of its digital lidar technology, accelerating adoption with its software solutions, and focused commercial execution.
The company's digital lidar technology powers OS and DF sensors that are high performance, highly customizable, reliable, and cost competitive. As it continues to upgrade the SoCs powering its OS and DF sensors, it expects to improve the performance of its sensors without significant negative impact to sensor cost or form factor. The company plans to leverage this dynamic to grow its sensor sales by steadily improving product performance.
For existing lidar users, software has the potential to decrease development time and improve system performance. For customers who historically rely on other sensor modalities or lack technical expertise, the introduction of software such as Ouster Gemini can catalyze the adoption of lidar by lowering the engineering resources required to transform raw data into actionable insights.
In addition to the company’s sensor and software growth opportunities. By building a commercial organization with highly-skilled employees and efficient processes and systems.
The key elements of the company’s growth strategy are to execute on its product roadmap; grow sales volumes from existing accounts; commercialize digital lidar for emerging automotive opportunities; expand its distribution network; expand its partner ecosystem; strengthen its worldwide sales and marketing presence; and pursue strategic transactions.
Sales and Marketing
The company maintains a global sales presence across the Americas, Europe, Middle East and Asia-Pacific markets. The company sells directly to the many of its customers and has also developed a global network of active distributors to sell, install and support its solutions. The company’s commercial team is made up of experienced leaders who have been developing a focused sales organization geared towards ramping its sales pipeline. The company continues to maintain a robust sales and marketing team to meet the demands of its existing customers and expects to expand its sales efforts to attract new customers. The company plans to continue to expand and optimize its dealer network to ensure that it has sufficient geographic coverage across both existing and new markets.
The company takes a targeted marketing approach to each of its four focused markets. The company develops and publishes digital content designed to educate its audience on how to use Ouster’s products, and selectively use other channels and advertising methods to attract customers. The company leverages opportunities to present and speak at market-specific conferences, executive events, trade shows and industry events to further develop its brand and reputation. These opportunities also allow the company to showcase its technology and attract additional customer interest. Through customer feedback, industry events and strategic relationships, the company continues to identify the evolving needs of its customers and, as a result, develop new and improved solutions. In addition, the company has a robust social media presence and are investing in various digital marketing strategies and tools to further reach customers, as well as build its brand. From time to time, the company sponsors universities and other non-profit organizations to increase awareness of its technology and showcase its capabilities.
Research and Development (R&D)
The company’s R&D expenses were $58.1 million during the year ended December 31, 2024.
Government Regulation
As a lidar technology company, the company is subject to the Electronic Product Radiation Control Provisions of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. These requirements are enforced by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Furthermore, the company is also subject to similar internationally harmonized standards and regulations governing the safe use of laser products.
The company’s products and solutions are also subject to U.S. and foreign trade and customs product classifications, including the U.S. Export Administration Regulations, U.S. Customs regulations and various economic and trade sanctions regulations administered by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Controls. U.S. export control laws and regulations and economic sanctions prohibit the shipment of certain products and services to countries, governments, and persons targeted by U.S. sanctions.
Similarly, the company is also subject to sourcing regulations such as the requirements under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 and the EU Conflict Minerals Regulation 2017/821, that require the company to carefully monitor its supply chain.
The company is subject to the requirements of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, as amended, (OSHA), and comparable international, state and local laws that protect and regulate employee health and safety.
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