10 Best Lidar Stocks To Buy Now

8. Cepton, Inc. (NASDAQ:CPTN)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders In Q2 2024: 5

Cepton, Inc. (NASDAQ:CPTN) is a diversified American lidar company that provides solutions for smart cities, cars, and industrial applications. This sets it apart from several lidar companies, and it ensures that the firm has a stable order flow and stream even if the automotive industry slows down, if car companies develop their own systems, or if another technology replaces lidar. Cepton, Inc. (NASDAQ:CPTN)’s pure play nature as a lidar company allows it to rapidly iterate products and expand its portfolio by releasing tertiary software products. For instance, the firm offers a lidar simulator called StudioViz which seeks to address automaker pain points of high data collection costs and long development times. However, Cepton, Inc. (NASDAQ:CPTN) has faced some troubles recently, especially during the tail end of 2023 when GM canceled a deal with the firm to produce headlights with built in lidars. Additionally, Cepton, Inc. (NASDAQ:CPTN) was also acquired by its manufacturing partner in July and is now a subsidiary.

Cepton, Inc. (NASDAQ:CPTN)’s management commented on the GM deal during the Q2 2024 earnings call:

“Since I’m kind of on the forefront of the customer side, I’ll answer you first. This is Mitch. Yes, there’s a lot of lessons learned from the GM program that go into our product evolution, you show that — you see that showing up in our new Ultra product. So all of the design and manufacturing lessons learned are built into our Ultra product. You see it in our new software ecosystem product called StudioViz that we announced last week. Again, this is pretty unique in the industry in that it takes into account all the manufacturing variances of building a lidar. And then I think maybe one of the last, but not least, important lesson learned is the supply chain. We have — we’re carrying over some of the suppliers that worked really well on the GM project and find new suppliers as their product has evolved. So yes, it puts us in a very competitive position for these new RFQs.”