Microvision Aquires Luminar, Plans Relationship Restoration, Multi-industry Push

The $33-million purchase ends the saga of bankrupt Luminar, once an $11 billion darling of the lidar industry.

February 5, 2026

Chris Clonts

Microvision CEO Glen DeVos with one of the company’s lidar-system demo cars in 2025. *(Steve Fecht)*

Microvision has completed its acquisition of Luminar, once a shining star of the lidar sector whose story entered its final troubled chapter in December when it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

In a briefing ahead of the official close of the sale, Microvision CEO Glen DeVos said the company was excited to take control of Luminar’s lidar technology, particularly its 1550nm-powered Halo offering, a compact high-performance (up to 500 meters of range) package that is easy to aesthetically integrate into vehicle design.

DeVos said Microvision had a five-year growth plan, but the opportunity to buy Luminar means a rapid acceleration of the company’s revenue growth forecast. “It pulled forward the revenue component and the customer-engagement component,” he said. DeVos said he’ll soon reach out to Volvo, which contributed to Luminar’s financial troubles by scaling back its purchase orders (by as much as 75%, according to a TechCrunch report ), and other customers, to repair relationships damaged by Luminar’s instability.

DeVos was named CEO in September and had been the company’s CTO since April, 2025. He said Microvision is excited to see what its approach, which relies on software to realize lidar’s full functionality and integration into ADAS systems, can do with Luminar’s hardware.

The company is on a bit of an acquisition tear, having acquired Scantinel Photonics in January. Scantinel is a Germany-based company developing 1550nm frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) lidar. With stiff cost competition from Chinese sensor makers Hesai and RoboSense on the horizon, DeVos said Microvision will have to compete with them in the automotive market. “In my experience, they will set the price,” he said. “We expect to be able to compete.”

DeVos said that Luminar’s people were another attraction. “They have a lot of really talented engineers globally, whether in Japan, Sweden or Orlando, where the company had its headquarters, an R&D office and a lidar manufacturing plant.”

He said that the company sees its own efforts helping develop the automotive market, which they predict will be the biggest market for lidar, by lowering unit prices. 1550nm units now start around $500. Industry experts have said that mass adoption would need a price below $250. The units are seen as critical for the development of SAE Level 3 autonomy.

But a big part of Microvision’s, well, vision, is expanding into the industrial and defense markets. DeVos said that “industrial ADAS doesn’t really exist today” before citing OSHA’s record that there are more than 30,000 injury-producing forklift accidents each year. That means ADAS has a natural market in factories and warehouses, he said. And “for defense,” he said, “being in the U.S. and Germany, that’s impactful.”

Luminar’s HALO lidar unit won multiple design awards for both its functionality and its compact, easily integrated form factor. *(Luminar)*

Addressing how Microvision’s lineup could be simplified with all the additions to the hardware portfolio, DeVos said that the MEMS (micro electric mechanical system) scanning in its Maven lidar “is fully developed and a technology building block. It tends to have a narrower field of view, so it isn’t the best fit for a 120 (degree) field of view.” He said that’s where a spinning-mirror lidar tends to increase the horizontal field of view. “We’re not so much looking at a replacement, but what can I take out of my approach with Maven and combine that with Halo to get a lower-cost system.”

The Luminar brand will not be used going forward, DeVos said. It is a spectacular flameout for the once-charging bull of the lidar business. During a presentation at CES 2023, CEO and founder Austin Russell said he wanted Luminar’s brand to be so well-known that vehicle shoppers would ask for it by name – perhaps an early reveal of the company’s misunderstanding of the automotive supply business, where most companies are happy to supply white-label solutions that compete at the intersection of quality and unit price.

DeVos said that, in retrospect, Luminar’s “cost structure… was too optimistic about business acquisition. Eventually, the revenue just didn’t come” quickly enough. “In auto supply,” he said, “future revenue is never guaranteed.”