Company: LIDRW
Filing Date: 2025-02-24
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0001437749-25-004906
Chunk: 81

Company: AEye, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-02-24
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1
Chunk 81
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 on the market and application. We consider design wins to be critical to our future success, although the revenue that may be generated by each design win and the time necessary to achieve such a design win can vary significantly, making it difficult to predict our financial performance. In the Non-Automotive market, our strategy has been to sell our lidar solutions to customers utilizing components that are sourced, in part, from the Tier 2 automotive supply chain and assembled by our contract manufacturing partners. In the Automotive market, we will utilize a licensing model with Tier 1 suppliers that would generate a royalty for us and, hence, can be more easily replicated with multiple Tier 1 suppliers. As the Tier 2 automotive supply chain matures, we intend to leverage those suppliers, and the volume created for the Automotive market, to participate in the Non-Automotive market. With that in mind, in the fourth quarter of 2023, we made the decision to wind down our legacy product line for the Non-Automotive market and curtailed support. Since the launch of our new product, Apollo, in 2024, we have seen renewed interest from Non-Automotive customers across a broad range of sectors and are actively engaged on multiple opportunities.  

In early 2024, we engaged LITEON as our Tier 1 automotive supplier and are actively working with them to bring our products to market. As part of this initiative, LITEON has committed to building and delivering Apollo B0 samples to us by the first quarter of 2025, marking a significant milestone in our product development. This partnership has enabled us to leverage their manufacturing expertise to produce high-quality samples that meet stringent performance standards, which is a critical step towards scaling production and delivering our advanced lidar solutions to the market. In May 2024, we announced a strategic partnership with ATI and LighTekton Co., Ltd to manufacture and distribute our products in China. This collaboration opens access to a potential $2.5 billion market opportunity. By leveraging ATI's and LighTekton's extensive networks and manufacturing capabilities, we aim to accelerate our market penetration and deliver our advanced lidar solutions to a broader audience. We have also made substantial progress in our collaboration efforts with Nvidia, demonstrating significant advances in the high-speed and long-range detection performance of our lidar systems, which we believe puts us on track for future integration with their Hyperion platform. Given these engagements are relatively recent, there is no guarantee that these endeavors will be successful.