Luminar’s founder and CEO Austin Russell hasn’t met fellow trailblazing Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe.
But he doesn’t need that one-on-one to understand the message from Rivian’s wildly successful debut on the Nasdaq this week.
“The Rivian IPO is awesome to see, the success there. I think it does show the level of disruption happening in this industry and the opportunity,” Russell said on Yahoo Finance Live.
Rivian is about to cap off one impressive start to being a public company, at least from a pure stock price performance.
Shares of Rivian popped 4% on Friday to $127, giving the EV upstart a lofty market cap of $125 billion, per Yahoo Finance Plus data. For perspective, the combined market caps of Ford and General Motors clocks in at $170 billion. Rivian’s IPO priced at $78 a share.
The enthusiasm on Rivian is despite the company being nowhere near producing its electric trucks at scale. Moreover, the company lost a staggering $2.4 billion from 2019 through the first six months of 2021, according to its prospectus.
That said, Lidar (Light Detection and Ranging) maker Luminar has been a solid story in its own right since its market debut back in December 2020.
The company has secured a barrage of new deals for its Lidar technology, most recently with Polestar (more on its upcoming IPO here) and Nvidia.
Russell told Yahoo Finance Live, Luminar should begin to see benefits of these deals in sales by 2023, as it ramps up production at scale.
By then, Rivian may be at $500 billion market cap.
Brian Sozzi is an editor-at-large and anchor at Yahoo Finance. Follow Sozzi on Twitter @BrianSozzi and on LinkedIn.
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Source: finance.yahoo.com