Luminar Technologies, Inc.

Welcome everyone to Luminar's fourth quarter and full year 2023 business update call. My name is Aileen Smith and I am Luminar's head of investor relations. With me today are Austin Russell, founder and chief executive officer, and Tom Fenimore, chief financial officer. As a reminder, this call is being recorded and you can find the shareholder letter that accompanies this call at investors.luminartech.com. Hopefully most folks have had a chance to review our shareholder letter as we are continuing with our new earnings format this quarter. As with last quarter, we will spend the majority of the call addressing questions from our stakeholders, including the retail investor questions posted on the SAVE platform, institutional investor questions emailed to our investors' inbox, and live questions from our analyst community. We will be checking these platforms intermittently throughout the duration of the call to address any questions that come in real time. Austin wanted to begin our call with some welcome remarks, including a look back on 23 and a look ahead into 2024. Before I pass the call over to him, I wanted to remind everyone that during the call, we may refer to GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Today's discussion also contains forward-looking statements based on the environment as we currently see it, and as such, does include risks and uncertainties. Please refer to our shareholder letter for more information on the specific risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially. With that, I'd like to introduce Luminar's founder and CEO, Austin Russell.

All right. Well, thanks, Aileen. You know, and great to see all you guys here. So, you know, maybe just a quick opener before we jump into Q&A, if you had a chance to be able to take a look at that letter, kind of informational package. You know, the team of I have been really quietly heads down, focused on execution and the core execution for our business with all eyes on the industry's first step. production vehicle launch with Luminar and Volvo as standard on the new EX90. And it's funny, I think this is going to be one of the, maybe even the last earning calls where we're a pre-production R&D company before we truly enter our growth stage. And I'd say it's become abundantly clear that we've all seen all the challenges that the autonomy industry has faced historically in being able to develop, industrialize, and enable this whole next generation of capabilities on vehicles. And bring it out into the commercial world and into consumers' hands. And really all of this has been laid bare to the public in recent history in the media and whatnot. A lot of this just comes down to the ambition of what most have been in the industry have been trying to do of replacing the driver altogether with robo-taxis. And this is where... From Luminar, from the beginning, we've taken a strategy of enhancing the driver and really focusing in on production vehicles. And that's where Luminar is succeeding, where the rest of the industry hasn't. And the last 10 years of what we've done at Luminar have really been leading up to this global launch on production vehicles right around the corner with Volvo. And we'll be covering this at Luminar Day. To date, we've invested over a billion dollars to develop a technology foundation product, industrialization capabilities. And this year, it's showtime. And it's true that there are incremental costs, like maybe what you saw this quarter that was more than the target. And we don't control all the timing for the vehicle launches. And we've learned a lot through the years on how we can even be more efficient. But now that's in our rearview mirror. And for the first time, our multi-billion dollar order book is going to be converting to revenue this year. For the first time, we're going to start seeing the benefits around the world into consumers' hands. And, you know, of course, automakers are going to be, well, maybe I shouldn't say of course, but in the case of Luminar, automakers are going to be getting to directly market our technology, you know, to their consumers. And this initial EX90 launch is going to be preceded by a flurry of additional mass produced vehicle launches with automakers around the world over the coming 36 months following this. So yeah, it's very exciting time, certainly gonna be enabling a lot of additional operational and economic efficiencies and exponential economic growth as we start realizing these benefits of the economies of scale with this program. So very excited everyone, stay tuned for a special Luminar Day on April 23rd and happy to be able to jump in with Tom here to be able to talk through the business, what's ahead, and yeah, sort of what we've had. As it relates, of course, to... To this year, you know, we were able to hit the majority of the overall milestones that we had throughout 2023. And we can give a little bit more commentary and, you know, questions on all of that. Though, again, the critical part is all around the core execution leading up to this launch. But, you know, we have also, in addition to that, you know, been able to continue to scale our business, adding additional resources. vehicle model commercial programs, you know, overall to our business plans. But again, the critical part is all about execution. That's what the industry hasn't done historically to be able to successfully launch. And that's what we're excited to be able to make happen for the first time.

I think we're ready for Q&A, Aileen, if you want to start us off.