LiDAR Sensor Companies: Who Makes What in Each Market

LiDAR sensors come from four largely separate industries, and no single company dominates all of them. Automotive-grade lidar is built by a handful of Chinese and Israeli-American suppliers plus the survivors of a rough 2023-2026 shakeout; industrial and robotics lidar comes from established sensor makers like Hokuyo alongside specialists like Slamtec and Livox; mapping and surveying lidar is still largely the territory of Leica Geosystems and RIEGL; and a small set of low-cost sensors serves makers and student robotics teams. This guide breaks down who is active in each group today — and who merged, renamed, or went bankrupt getting there.

Automotive LiDAR companies

Automotive lidar is the most crowded and most volatile segment on this list: it absorbed billions in venture and SPAC funding after 2018, and the last three years have thinned the field considerably. These are the suppliers still building automotive-grade sensors today.

Hesai Technology

Hesai (Nasdaq: HSAI; also listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange as HKEX: 2525) describes itself as a "Physical AI infrastructure company" rather than purely a lidar maker. Its product line spans automotive-grade lidar (the ET, AT, and OT series), fully solid-state short-range units (FT), and lower-cost 360° sensors (XT, QT, JT), alongside a spatial-intelligence software platform called Kosmo and robotic actuation modules — the company's own framing is that it covers the full "see, understand, act" chain for robotics and autonomous vehicles, not just the sensor.

Ouster (and what happened to Velodyne)

Ouster builds digital, time-of-flight lidar across four hardware lines — OS0, OS1, OS1 Max, and OS2, plus the fixed-mount OSDome — sold into automotive, robotics and drones, industrial, security, and traffic/ITS markets. Ouster's current footprint is larger than its own product history suggests: in February 2023 it merged with Velodyne, the company that essentially created the automotive-lidar category. Velodyne had been spun off from Velodyne Acoustics, a subwoofer company, in 2016 by founder David Hall. The combined company kept the Ouster name, and the Velodyne brand no longer sells sensors on its own.

Innoviz Technologies

Innoviz, based in Tel Aviv, was the first automotive-grade solid-state lidar supplier selected by a major automaker for mass production: working with tier-one supplier Magna, it was chosen by BMW in 2018, and its InnovizOne sensor has been on the road in the BMW i7 since March 2024, supporting Level 3 automated driving. The newer InnovizTwo sensor — rated for 0.1° x 0.1° angular resolution, a 1-250 m detection range, and ISO 26262 ASIL B(D) compliance — underpins a next-generation development agreement with BMW, and Innoviz has also disclosed lidar deployments on the Volkswagen ID. Buzz and a partnership with Mobileye.

RoboSense

RoboSense is one of the three major Chinese automotive-lidar suppliers, alongside Hesai and Seyond. Where Hesai and Seyond built a Nasdaq presence, RoboSense took a different route to public capital, listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange instead — a split that reflects how fragmented the paths to funding have become for lidar makers competing for the same automaker contracts.

Seyond (formerly Innovusion)

Seyond is the rebranded identity of Innovusion, the company best known as Nio's lidar supplier; the English name changed on December 15, 2023 — a fusion of "see" and "beyond" — while the underlying company, its Chinese name, and its existing customer relationships carried over unchanged. Headquartered in Silicon Valley with R&D and manufacturing in Suzhou and Ningbo, Seyond's current product line includes the Falcon K, Robin W, Robin E1X, and Hummingbird D1 sensors, plus SIMPL, a software platform for intelligent-transportation deployments. The company lists automotive, ITS (intersections and highways), robotics and logistics, stationary retail and security, and off-road (agriculture, construction, mining, rail) among its target industries.

Aeva

Aeva builds FMCW ("frequency-modulated continuous wave") lidar, a design that measures velocity and range simultaneously rather than inferring speed from successive frames the way pulsed lidar does. Its automotive-grade lines are Atlas and the slimmer, higher-resolution Atlas Ultra, aimed at SAE Level 3/4 programs; Omni is a shorter-range, wide-field sensor the company positions for broader "physical AI" applications outside cars, and Eve 1 repurposes the same FMCW principle as a laser speed sensor for factory automation.

Cepton (now part of Koito)

Cepton is no longer an independent public company. Japanese automotive lighting and sensing supplier Koito Manufacturing — which had already been collaborating with Cepton on lidar since 2017 — signed a definitive agreement in July 2024 to acquire it outright, in an all-cash deal at roughly a 25% premium to Cepton's trading price at the time. The transaction closed on January 7, 2025, Cepton's shares were delisted from Nasdaq, and it now operates as a privately held Koito subsidiary, still headquartered in San Jose and still selling under its own brand: the Vista Ultra and Nova Ultra hardware lines, paired with its Helius perception software.

MicroVision (and the end of Luminar)

MicroVision sells its own MOVIA L and MOVIA S solid-state lidar sensors for automotive, industrial, and security-and-defense use — but the more consequential recent development is what it bought. Luminar Technologies, once one of the best-funded names in automotive lidar (it went public via a SPAC merger in 2020 and signed Volvo as a lidar customer that same year), filed for bankruptcy, and its lidar assets went to a Section 363 bankruptcy auction. MicroVision won that auction on January 26, 2026 with a cash bid of 33 million dollars, edging out a competing 28 million dollar offer from Quantum Computing Inc.; a bankruptcy court approved the sale the next day, and the deal closed on February 3, 2026. It handed MicroVision the intellectual property and inventory behind Luminar's Iris and Halo sensors, plus engineering staff and existing commercial contracts — MicroVision now sells IRIS and HALO as its own product lines.

Robotics and industrial LiDAR companies

Away from passenger cars, a different set of companies supplies lidar for warehouses, factories, and mobile robots — a market that weighs reliability and safety certification as heavily as raw range.

Hokuyo

Hokuyo is a Japanese industrial sensor manufacturer whose catalog includes lidar sensors, safety laser scanners, obstacle-detection sensors, and crane collision-avoidance systems, sold into factory automation, logistics automation, and process automation. Its scanners are a common building block in autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), where a sensor's certified safety rating matters as much as how well it measures distance — unlike a camera, a lidar scanner returns direct range data regardless of ambient lighting, a tradeoff covered in our LiDAR vs camera comparison.

Slamtec

Slamtec, based in Shanghai, is best known for its RPLIDAR line — the A1, A2, and A3 triangulation sensors plus the newer C1, S2, and S3 units — which the company markets specifically for robot mapping and navigation rather than automotive use. Beyond the sensors themselves, Slamtec also sells complete robot chassis platforms (Poseidon, Hermes, Phoebus) and an AI-based SLAM module, Aurora, that fuses vision, inertial navigation, and lidar for spatial perception.

Livox

Livox's product range runs from the compact, cost-focused Mid-360 series to the kilometer-range Avia 2 and the Tele-15, which the company describes as the first 500-meter-range automotive lidar. Its sensors span a wide set of applications — high-speed autonomous driving, HD mapping, and V2X on the automotive side, and delivery, warehouse, and floor-scrubbing robots on the robotics side — and its HAP sensor is deployed on the Xpeng P5 passenger car.

Mapping and surveying LiDAR companies

Long before automotive lidar existed, terrestrial and airborne laser scanning was already an established discipline for surveyors, and two companies still anchor that market.

Leica Geosystems

Leica Geosystems, part of Hexagon, sells reality-capture and 3D laser-scanning equipment into surveying, heavy construction, mining, utilities, power-and-plant monitoring, and agriculture. Its instruments target the kind of millimeter-precision, large-scale capture work — scanning a building facade, a mine face, or a stretch of rail corridor — that sits well outside what any automotive or robotics lidar is built for. For projects where a camera-based method might substitute for a laser scanner at lower cost, our photogrammetry vs LiDAR comparison covers the tradeoffs.

RIEGL

RIEGL, based in Austria, has been building lidar hardware since 1978 — longer than any other company on this list — and specializes in terrestrial laser scanners (the VZ series, including the VZ-2000i and VZ-6000i) and mobile mapping systems (the VMY series) for high-precision surveying and infrastructure documentation.

Low-cost and hobbyist LiDAR

A separate tier of lidar sensors exists for makers, students, and small robotics projects, where cost and ease of integration matter more than automotive-grade certification. Slamtec's RPLIDAR A1 and A2 units are marketed explicitly as robot mapping and navigation sensors rather than automotive components, and their price point and USB/serial interfaces have made them a common building block in university robotics courses and open hardware projects — the same niche where a Raspberry Pi 5 is a frequent host computer. Livox's Mid-360 series, marketed on cost as much as on performance, has pulled some of that same budget-conscious robotics and mapping work toward higher-resolution 3D sensing than triangulation lidar can offer. Neither category should be confused with automotive-grade hardware: none of the sensors above carry the environmental or functional-safety certification an automotive program requires.

Consolidation: the mergers and exits that reshaped the market

Four separate ownership changes in three years reshuffled who actually makes automotive lidar today:

Not every move was a retreat: while Velodyne, Innovusion's old name, and Luminar disappeared or restructured, Hesai listed on Nasdaq and RoboSense listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in the same broad period — a reminder that this is a market with casualties and companies still raising capital to expand side by side.

How to choose a LiDAR supplier

Which company matters far less than which market segment you're buying into, because the hardware, software, and certification requirements barely overlap between them. An automotive program needs ISO 26262 functional-safety documentation and a supplier with a mass-production track record — the list of names that qualify is short. A robotics or AMR project cares more about a clean SDK, ROS support, and a sensor built for indoor mapping rather than long automotive range. A surveying project needs absolute positional accuracy and a scanner designed for tripod or vehicle-mounted capture, not perception software at all. A maker project mostly needs a low price and a well-documented serial or USB interface. Start from the application, not the brand, and the shortlist narrows itself — our guide to how LiDAR sensors work and how to choose one walks through the underlying specs — range, resolution, mechanical vs. solid-state vs. FMCW — that actually separate these products.

Frequently asked questions about LiDAR sensor companies

Is there one leading LiDAR sensor company?

No single company leads across every market. Automotive lidar is split between Hesai, RoboSense, Seyond, Innoviz, Aeva, Ouster, and now MicroVision; industrial and robotics lidar has separate players like Hokuyo, Slamtec, and Livox; and mapping and surveying is still anchored by Leica Geosystems and RIEGL. None of these companies publish independently audited market-share figures that would let you rank them against each other.

What happened to Velodyne?

Velodyne, the company that essentially invented spinning automotive lidar, merged with Ouster in February 2023. The combined company operates under the Ouster name, and Velodyne no longer sells sensors under its own brand.

Why did Luminar go bankrupt, and who has its technology now?

Luminar filed for bankruptcy after years of losses following its 2020 SPAC IPO. Its lidar intellectual property, inventory, and the Iris and Halo sensor lines were sold to MicroVision through a Section 363 bankruptcy auction that closed in February 2026, after MicroVision outbid a rival offer from Quantum Computing Inc.

Does Tesla use LiDAR sensors?

Not in its production vehicles. Tesla has built its driver-assistance systems around cameras instead of lidar from any of the suppliers above, a decision the company has defended publicly for years; our LiDAR vs radar guide covers the tradeoffs behind that kind of sensor choice.

Which company makes the best LiDAR sensor for my project?

There isn't a single best sensor independent of the application. An automotive program, a warehouse robot, a survey crew, and a student robotics team each need different range, resolution, certification, and price points — match the market segment above to your use case rather than picking a brand first.

Are there low-cost LiDAR sensors for hobby robotics?

Yes. Slamtec's RPLIDAR A1 and A2 and Livox's Mid-360 series are both marketed specifically for robot mapping and navigation rather than automotive use, with USB or serial interfaces that make them straightforward to integrate into a maker or student robotics project.