Velodyne Lidar

David Hall founded Velodyne in 1983 as an audio company specializing in subwoofer technology.Velodyne's experience with laser distance measurement started in 2005, when David Hall and his brother Bruce entered a vehicle in a driverless car race called DARPA Grand Challenge sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency . The experience led them to realize shortcomings both in camera-centric approaches and in existing lidar technology, which only scanned a single, fixed line of sight. Velodyne developed new sensors for the 2007 race. The brothers sold their perception detection system as a steering input to five of the six teams that finished the 2007 race. The system rotated 64 lasers and measured the time of flight to calculate distances to surrounding objects. This created a 360-degree 3D map of the environment. The new system produced one million data points per second, while earlier systems produced 5,000 data points per second.

Velodyne donated one of its early prototype sensors to the Robotics Collection at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History in 2011.In 2016, Velodyne's Lidar department was spun off from Velodyne Acoustics as Velodyne Lidar, Inc. On August 16, 2016, Velodyne announced a $150M investment from Ford and Baidu.In 2017, Velodyne opened a factory in San Jose, California. The company also has an R&D center in Alameda, California. The same year, Velodyne also provided their sensors as a sponsor of the SAE GM AutoDrive Challenge, a three-year competition in which eight university teams develop an automated vehicle.Since 2018, Velodyne has partnered with Mothers Against Drunk Driving in a campaign to promote the use of autonomous vehicles for improving roadway safety and preventing impaired driving deaths. Since October 2018, Velodyne has organized an annual World Safety Summit on Autonomous Technology. In the same year, the company also signed agreements to collaborate with Nikon and Veoneer for manufacturing and mass production.In July 2019, the company acquired mapping and localization software as well as intellectual property assets from Mapper.ai.In January 2020, Hall stepped down as CEO and was replaced by Anand Gopalan, who was previously CTO, although Hall initially remained chairman of the company's board of directors and continued to be the company's largest shareholder. On July 2, 2020, Velodyne Lidar merged with Graf Industrial Corp. to become a publicly-traded company. In September 2020, the company began trading stocks and warrants on NASDAQ under the ticker symbols VLDR and VLDRW.In January 2021, Hall was censured by the company and removed as chairman of the board, and Hall's wife's employment at the company was terminated, as the relationship between the company and Hall together with Hall's wife Marta Thoma Hall became highly antagonistic, with the Halls and the company accusing each other of serious misconduct. However, Hall has retained a large stake in the company and his wife has remained on its board of directors.In November 2021, Gopalan was replaced as CEO with Theodore Tewksbury, a former chief executive at a low-power AI vision systems company, Eta Compute.On February 7, 2022, the company's stock price surged over 50 percent when the internet retailer Amazon agreed to invest in the company with the purchase of 40 million of its shares.