Self-driving car startup Aurora has acquired lidar company Blackmore, which has raised $21.5M; sources: GM's Cruise was looking at acquiring Blackmore last year
Kirsten Korosec / TechCrunch :
Context & Ripple Effects
Aurora has moved fast from raising capital to spending it: after a $530M Series B led by Sequoia at a $2.5B+ valuation, the self-driving startup is buying its lidar in-house, acquiring Blackmore, which had raised $21.5M. Sources tell TechCrunch that GM's Cruise had explored acquiring Blackmore last year, so Aurora may have taken a target off a rival's list.
The playbook has precedent: GM bought Cruise in 2016 and then acquired lidar startup Strobe in 2017 to fold the sensor into Cruise's stack. Aurora, which has since added Hyundai to its cap table, is following the same verticalization path — and doing it with the fresh capital to move quickly.
First-order effects
- Aurora now owns its lidar development rather than buying it from a third-party supplier, and Blackmore's investors exit with the $21.5M-backed company absorbed into a $2.5B+ platform.
Second-order effects
- Cruise loses a lidar target it had reportedly evaluated, and GM's Strobe-style in-house approach is now matched by its best-funded independent competitor.
Third-order effects
- If the Strobe and Blackmore deals mark the pattern, standalone lidar startups increasingly get consolidated into well-capitalized AV developers rather than surviving as independent sensor vendors — a shift toward vertically integrated stacks at the top-funded players.
The trend: Self-driving developers are absorbing lidar makers in-house, converting sensor suppliers from vendors into acquired components of vertically integrated AV stacks.