Innoviz set to go public with $1.4B valuation

In This Article:

Yahoo Finance’s Alexis Christoforous and Omer Keilaf, Innoviz CEO, discuss the company’s going public via SPAC and the future of autonomous vehicles.

Video Transcript

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: The Israeli LIDAR startup Innoviz is going public next month at a $1.4 billion reverse merger with Collective Growth Corp. LIDAR sensors, of course, allow autonomous vehicles to see and safely navigate their surroundings.

Joining me now from Israel is Innoviz's CEO Omer Keilaf. Omer, good to see you. There is a lot of money pouring into EV-- the AV space, rather. Innoviz is going to be the fourth LIDAR company to go public in just the past year via SPAC. What do you plan to do with the money you raised from that sale next month?

OMER KEILAF: Yeah, thank you. So Innoviz is now moving into the next stage of going into high volume production. So that's a big part of our need to expedite our process. We have been working on a BMW program to go public in a couple of years and are now engaging into additional, several programs which requires us to grow.

We already have our first product available, InnovizOne, which you actually can see on the screen, which is a very high performance product. But we are now also launching our next generation product, which is even higher performance and at a lower cost. We want to penetrate the bigger markets.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: Yeah, talk to me a little bit about these new use cases for LIDAR. I know you're planning things in different areas, campuses-- I think school campuses, agriculture, even outer space. What are some of the other use cases?

OMER KEILAF: Yeah, I think the opportunities for LIDAR are, I think, beyond imagination. Every time I meet with different companies, I learn about new uses for 3D sensing that are fairly small and automotive grade. But to say we are very focused on automotive, this is really, I think, our advantage, to be part of a series production like BMW.

There are many cases like level 3 and level 4 and shuttle businesses that we are involved with. But as you said earlier, that there are really endless opportunities for all the sensors and so on.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: You mentioned BMW. In addition to that automaker, do you have other supplier agreements in place?

OMER KEILAF: Yeah, sure. So we are currently working with faulty ones that we work with in order to adopt the technology in different programs. There are several car makers that we are now in kind of advanced technology programs that we are involved with. I expect to be able to announce a few in the coming months.