Ouster announces $42 million Series B funding

Today, Ouster announced to the press that we recently raised $42 million of new investment to fund product development and further accelerate our worldwide sales. After launching our second generation of high-resolution digital lidar sensors in January, we’ve seen tremendous demand across a wide variety of industries, including robotics, industrial automation, autonomous vehicles, and smart infrastructure. 

To read the full press release, click here. A summary of the announcement is below:

A disruptive digital technology

Ouster’s second-generation sensors demonstrate the power of digital lidar technology. Replacing complex legacy analog architecture, we believe our simplified semiconductor-based technology allows us to decouple price from performance and accelerate product development, manufacturing, and customer adoption. 

“Ouster’s digital lidar architecture gives us fundamental advantages that are winning over customers in every market we serve. We see digital CMOS technology as the future of lidar and believe Ouster was the first to invent, build, patent, and commercialize digital lidar. Once our customers experience the resolution and reliability of these sensors at an affordable price, there’s no turning back to legacy analog lidar,” said Angus Pacala, CEO of Ouster.

Winning key customers in every market

Ouster now counts over 450 paying customers as of 2020 across 15 markets, including Konecranes, Postmates, Ike, May Mobility, Kodiak Robotics, Coast Autonomous, the U.S. Army, NASA, Stanford University, and MIT, as well as Chinese automation leaders idriverplus, WhaleAI, Hongjing Drive, and Qcraft.

Customers such as Ike, a leading developer of automated trucking technology, say that Ouster stands out for its performance on Ike’s rigorous requirements. “Ouster’s sensors help us in our mission to make trucking safer and more productive. The digital lidar design provides us unmatched resolution to see in a truck’s blind spots and outstanding reliability to endure extended use on Class 8 trucks. Ouster is also a great partner, always listening to our feedback and using it to improve their sensors,” said Nancy Sun, Co-Founder and Chief Engineer of Ike.

Accelerating Revenue Growth

Ouster’s 62% twelve-month revenue growth comes from customers replacing legacy analog lidar sensors with Ouster’s high-resolution digital lidar technology. Ouster’s revenue ranks second among high-resolution lidar companies and is growing significantly faster than the incumbent leader, according to analysts at Yole Development. The demand for Ouster’s second generation sensors quickly hit an inflection point after customers received sample units, and despite the global onset of COVID-19, Ouster recorded Q3 bookings growth of 209% year over year. 

The diversity of our customer base gives Ouster a total addressable market of at least $40B by 2030, with traction today coming from customer design wins in factory and port automation, automated ground vehicle (AGV) robotics, mining, agriculture, autonomous vehicles, and smart infrastructure.

A Complete Lidar Sensor Portfolio

The January launch of our second generation of lidar sensors introduced three new 128-beam models, each of which addresses key customer use cases:

• The OS0 ultra-wide view lidar sensor for navigating urban environments and warehouses. 
• The OS1 mid-range lidar sensor, with a 120 meter range and a 45 degree field of view. 
• The OS2 long-range lidar sensor, with a 200+ meter range for high-speed vehicle automation. 

Each sensor leads its category in resolution and price, giving customers more data to use with computer vision algorithms at pricing that supports wide-scale commercial deployment. All three products are currently shipping to customers and are available in 50 different configurations. 

In response to strong global demand, Ouster has opened offices in Paris, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, and Suzhou to expand global sales and customer service capabilities. We’ve also expanded overseas production of its sensors with Benchmark, a TS16949 certified contract manufacturer, to keep up with growing demand. 

To learn about how Ouster’s digital lidar sensors can help your use case, reach out to our team of experts.