Company: LIDRW
Filing Date: 2025-05-12
Form Type: 10-Q
Source: 0001437749-25-015868
Chunk: 96

Company: AEye, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-05-12
Form: 10-Q
Item: Part I, Item 1
Chunk 96
---
. 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, with Apollo having entered Nvidia’s independent testing phase. Given these engagements are relatively recent, there is no guarantee that these endeavors will be successful.

We believe our revenue and profitability will also be dependent upon our success in licensing our technology to Tier 1 automotive suppliers, such as our current Tier 1 partner, LITEON, and these partners securing program awards from OEMS and scaling to high volume production of our lidar sensors. Delays in autonomy programs by OEMs that we are currently or plan to be working with through our Tier 1 partners could result in us being unable to achieve our revenue and profitability targets in the time frame we anticipate, or at all.

       22

Gross Margin

Our gross margins will depend on numerous factors, including, among others, the selling price of our products, pricing of our development contracts with customers, royalty rates on licenses we grant to our customers, unit volumes, product mix, component costs, personnel costs, contract manufacturing costs, overhead costs, and product features. Our gross margins have in the past, and may continue to be, negatively impacted by inventory write-downs. In the future, we expect to generate attractive gross margins from licensing our lidar technology and software to our Tier 1 partners in the Automotive market. We also anticipate being able to leverage on our foundation in the Automotive market to move to other markets.

To date, our revenue has primarily been generated through development contracts with OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers, as well as unit sales of our products to Non-Automotive market customers. These development contracts primarily focus on customization of our proprietary 4SightTM product capabilities to our customers’ applications, typically involving software implementation to assist with sensor connection and control, customization of scan patterns, and enhancement of particular perception capabilities to meet specific customer needs. In general, development contracts that require more complex configurations have higher prices. We expect development contracts to remain a significant part of our business in the near term, but represent a smaller share of our total revenue over time as we increase our focus on technology licensing in the Automotive market and leverage these economies of scale to expand into the Non-Automotive market.

Investment and Innovation

Our proprietary adaptive intelligent lidar technology delivers industry-leading performance, addressing the toug