Earlier this 12 months, Luminar founder and CEO Austin Russell abruptly resigned from his place after it was revealed he was the goal of an ethics inquiry. Now, the 30-year-old billionaire is making an attempt to wrest again management of his previous firm, which made him a fortune by designing lidar sensors of self-driving automobiles.
According to an SEC filing (and first reported by TechCrunch), Russell desires to accumulate “100% of the excellent shares of the Class A Frequent Inventory” in Luminar underneath the auspices of his new firm, Russell AI Labs. The brand new firm would nonetheless be publicly listed (Luminar went public via a reverse SPAC merger in 2020) and traded underneath the identical “LAZR” ticker image.
Russell says within the submitting he was invited to accumulate the corporate “on the suggestion of sure shareholders and the invitation of sure members of the board of administrators” of Luminar. On the time, Luminar didn’t clarify the rationale for Russell’s departure, nor has it mentioned whether or not the ethics inquiry turned something up.
Russell based his new enterprise in September together with Markus Schaefer, CTO of Mercedes-Benz Group AG, and Murtaza Ahmed, former managing accomplice at Softbank. In the meantime, Luminar has encountered monetary difficulties over the previous 12 months, has gone via a number of rounds of layoffs, and was nearly delisted from the NASDAQ.