OUST · Read the filing

oust-20231231

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UNITED STATES

SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION

Washington, D.C. 20549

___________________________________

FORM 10-K

___________________________________

(Mark One)

For the fiscal year ended December 31, 2023

For the transition period from ________ to ________

Commission file number 001-39463

___________________________________

Ouster, Inc.

(Exact name of registrant as specified in its charter)

___________________________________

350 Treat AvenueSan Francisco, California 94110

(Address of principal executive offices) (Zip Code)

Registrant's telephone number, including area code:(415) 949-0108

Securities registered pursuant to Section 12(b) of the Act:

Title of each class Trading Symbol(s) Name of each exchange on which registered

Common stock, $0.0001 par value per share OUST New York Stock Exchange

Warrants to purchase common stock OUST WS New York Stock Exchange

Warrants to purchase common stock expiring 2025 OUST WSA NYSE American

Securities registered pursuant to section 12(g) of the Act: None

Indicate by check mark if the registrant is a well-known seasoned issuer, as defined in Rule 405 of the Securities Act.

Yes ☐No☒

Indicate by check mark if the registrant is not required to file reports pursuant to Section 13 or Section 15(d) of the Act. Yes ☐No☒

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant (1) has filed all reports required to be filed by Section 13 or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the registrant was required to file such reports), and (2) has been subject to such filing requirements for the past 90 days. Yes☒ No ☐

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant has submitted electronically every Interactive Data File required to be submitted pursuant to Rule 405 of Regulation S-T (§232.405 of this chapter) during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the registrant was required to submit such files). Yes☒ No ☐

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is a large accelerated filer, an accelerated filer, a non-accelerated filer, a smaller reporting company, or an emerging growth company. See the definitions of “large accelerated filer,” “accelerated filer,” “smaller reporting company” and “emerging growth company” in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act.

Large accelerated filer ☐ Accelerated filer ☐

Non-accelerated filer ☒ Smaller reporting company ☒

Emerging growth company ☐

If an emerging growth company, indicate by check mark if the registrant has elected not to use the extended transition period for complying with any new or revised financial accounting standards provided pursuant to Section 13(a) of the Exchange Act. ☐

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant has filed a report on and attestation to its management’s assessment of the effectiveness of its internal control over financial reporting under Section 404(b) of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (15 U.S.C. 7262(b)) by the registered public accounting firm that prepared or issued its audit report. ☐

If securities are registered pursuant to Section 12(b) of the Act, indicate by check mark whether the financial statements of the registrant included in the filing reflect the correction of an error to previously issued financial statements. ☐

Indicate by check mark whether any of those error corrections are restatements that required a recovery analysis of incentive-based compensation received by any of the registrant’s executive officers during the relevant recovery period pursuant to §240.10D-1(b). ☐

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is a shell company (as defined in Rule 12b-2 of the Act). Yes ☐ No ☒

The aggregate market value of the voting and non-voting stock held by non-affiliates of the registrant, as of June 30, 2023, the last business day of the registrant’s most recently completed second fiscal quarter, was approximately $174.1 million.

The registrant had 40,671,374 shares of common stock outstanding as of March 21, 2024.

Documents Incorporated by Reference:

Specifically identified portions of the registrant’s definitive proxy statement relating to its 2024 annual meeting of stockholders are incorporated by reference in Part III of this Annual Report on Form 10-K where indicated. The registrant's definitive proxy statement will be filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”) within 120 days after the end of the registrant’s fiscal year ended December 31, 2023.

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PART I

Item 1. Business 4

Item 1A. Risk Factors 17

Item 1B. Unresolved Staff Comments 45

Item 1C. Cybersecurity 45

Item 2. Properties 46

Item 3. Legal Proceedings 46

Item 4. Mine Safety Disclosures 46

PART II

Item 6. [Reserved] 47

Item 7A. Quantitative and Qualitative Disclosures About Market Risk 60

Item 8. Financial Statements and Supplementary Data 62

Item 9A. Controls and Procedures 105

Item 9B. Other Information 107

Item 9C. Disclosure Regarding Foreign Jurisdictions that Prevent Inspections 107

PART III

Item 10. Directors, Executive Officers and Corporate Governance 108

Item 11. Executive Compensation 108

Item 14. Principal Accountant Fees and Services 110

PART IV

Item 15. Exhibits and Financial Statement Schedules 110

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FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

This Annual Report on Form 10-K contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. We intend such forward-looking statements to be covered by the safe harbor provisions for forward-looking statements contained in Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the “Securities Act”) and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended (the “Exchange Act”). All statements other than statements of historical fact contained in this Annual Report on Form 10-K may be forward-looking statements. The words “anticipates,” “believe(s),” “could,” “contemplates,”, “continue,” “expects,” “estimates,” “forecasts,” “intends,” “may,” “plans,” “projects,” “predicts,” “potential” “should,” “targets,” or “will” and similar expressions or the negative of these terms or expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements, though not all forward-looking statements use these words or expressions. Forward-looking statements contained in this Annual Report on Form 10-K include, but are not limited to statements regarding our ability to maintain or grow our global sales and bolster our financial position; our expectations surrounding the Velodyne Merger (as defined herein); our ability to maintain or grow our global sales and marketing organization; our expected contractual obligations and capital expenditures; the capabilities of and demand for our products; our anticipated new product launches; our future results of operations and financial position; industry and business trends; the remediation of material weaknesses; the impact of market conditions and other macroeconomic factors on our business, financial condition and results of operation; our future business strategy, plans, distribution partnerships, market growth and our objectives for future operations.

The forward-looking statements are neither promises nor guarantees, but involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other important factors that may cause our actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. We have based these forward-looking statements largely on our current expectations and projections about future events and financial trends that we believe may affect our business, financial condition and results of operations. Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other important factors that may cause our actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements, including, but not limited to, the important factors discussed in Part I, Item 1A, “Risk Factors” in this Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2023. The forward-looking statements in this Annual Report on Form 10-K are based upon information available to us as of the date of this Annual Report on Form 10-K, and while we believe such information forms a reasonable basis for such statements, such information may be limited or incomplete, and our statements should not be read to indicate that we have conducted an exhaustive inquiry into, or review of, all potentially available relevant information. These statements are inherently uncertain and investors are cautioned not to unduly rely upon these statements.

You should read this Annual Report on Form 10-K and the documents that we reference in this Annual Report on Form 10-K and have filed as exhibits to this Annual Report on Form 10-K with the understanding that our actual future results, levels of activity, performance and achievements may be materially different from what we expect. We qualify all of our forward-looking statements by these cautionary statements. These forward-looking statements speak only as of the date of this Annual Report on Form 10-K. While we may elect to update such forward-looking statements at some point in the future, we disclaim any obligation to do so, even if subsequent events cause our views to change.

GENERAL

Unless the context otherwise requires, references in this Annual Report on Form 10-K to “we”, “our”, “Ouster” and “the Company” refer to the business and operations of Ouster Technologies, Inc. (“OTI”) (formerly known as Ouster, Inc.) and its consolidated subsidiaries prior to the Colonnade Merger (as defined herein) and to Ouster, Inc. (formerly known as Colonnade Acquisition Corp.) and its consolidated subsidiaries following the consummation of the Colonnade Merger.

On December 21, 2020, OTI entered into an Agreement and Plan of Merger (the “Colonnade Merger Agreement”) with Colonnade Acquisition Corp., a Cayman Islands exempted company (“CLA”), and Beam Merger Sub, Inc. (“Merger Sub”), a Delaware corporation and subsidiary of CLA. OTI’s and CLA’s board of directors unanimously approved OTI’s entry into the Colonnade Merger Agreement, and on March 11, 2021, the transactions contemplated by the Colonnade Merger Agreement were consummated (all such transactions, the “Business Combination”), as further described herein. Pursuant to the terms of the Colonnade Merger Agreement, (i) CLA domesticated as a corporation incorporated under the laws of the State of Delaware (the “Domestication”) and changed its name to “Ouster, Inc.” (with CLA after such domestication and the other transactions pursuant to the Colonnade Merger Agreement being referred to as the “Company”) and (ii) Merger Sub merged with and into OTI (the “Colonnade Merger”), with OTI surviving the Colonnade Merger.

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We may announce material business and financial information to our investors using our investor relations website at https://investors.ouster.com. We therefore encourage investors and others interested in Ouster to review the information that we make available on our website, in addition to following our filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”), webcasts, press releases and conference calls. Information contained on our website is not part of this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

On April 6, 2023, the Company’s Board of Directors approved a one-for-10 reverse stock split and a corresponding reduction in authorized shares of common stock (the “Reverse Stock Split”). On April 20, 2023, the Company filed with the Secretary of State of the State of Delaware a Certificate of Amendment to its Certificate of Incorporation to effect the one-for-10 Reverse Stock Split of the Company’s common stock and a corresponding reduction in authorized shares of common stock. The par value of the Company’s common stock was not adjusted as a result of the Reverse Stock Split. The share and per share information included in this Annual Report of Form 10-K, including the historical share and per share information, has been adjusted to reflect the Reverse Stock Split.

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SUMMARY RISK FACTORS

Our business is subject to numerous risks and uncertainties, including those described in Part I, Item 1A. “Risk Factors” in this Annual Report on Form 10-K. You should carefully consider these risks and uncertainties when investing in our common stock. The principal risks and uncertainties affecting our business include the following:

•Our products are frequently used in applications that are subject to evolving regulations and standards.

•Ourlimited operating history makes it difficult to evaluate our future prospects and the risks and challenges we may encounter.

•We have incurred significant losses to date and may never achieve or sustain profitability. If we are unable to overcome our limited sales history and establish and maintain confidence in our long-term business prospects among customers in our target markets or if our revenue opportunity does not materialize into sales and revenue, then our financial condition, operating results, business prospects and access to capital may suffer materially.

•Our revenue and margins could be adversely affected if we fail to maintain competitive average selling prices, high sales volumes, and/or fail to reduce product costs.

•We are subject to the risk of cancellation or postponement of our contracts with customers or the unsuccessful implementation of our products, which may adversely affect our business, results of operations and financial condition.

•We currently target many customers that are large corporations with substantial negotiating power and exacting product standards. If we are unable to sell our products to these customers, our prospects and results of operations will be adversely affected.

•We compete against established market participants that have substantially greater resources than us and against known and unknown market entrants who may disrupt our target markets. If our products are not selected for inclusion in our target markets, our business will be materially and adversely affected.

•Market adoption of lidar remains uncertain, and it is difficult to forecast long-term end-customer adoption rates and demand for our products.

•Our operating results may fluctuate significantly, which makes our future operating results difficult to predict and could cause our operating results to fall below expectations or any guidance we may provide and could cause our stock price to fluctuate or decline.

•We may be unable to successfully integrate our business with Velodyne or realize the expected benefits on our expected timeframe or at all.

•Key components in our products come from limited or single source third-party suppliers, and we expect to rely on third parties to manufacture a significant portion of our products for the foreseeable future. Interruptions in our relationships with these third parties could adversely impact our business.

•We face risks related to our indebtedness.

•We may require additional capital in order to execute our business plan, which may not be available on terms acceptable to us, or at all.

•We may not be able to adequately protect or enforce our intellectual property rights or prevent competitors or other unauthorized parties from copying or reverse engineering our technology.

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Part I

Item 1. Business.

Overview

Ouster, Inc. is building the eyes of autonomy. We are a leading global provider of lidar sensors for the automotive, industrial, robotics, and smart infrastructure industries. Ouster’s products include high-resolution scanning and solid-state digital lidar sensors, analog lidar sensors, and software solutions.

We anticipate that 3D vision technologies, coupled with artificial intelligence, will power new autonomous technologies that in turn will fundamentally disrupt business models across many existing industries and also enable entirely new industries and capabilities. We believe that our digital lidar sensors are one of the highest performing, lowest cost solutions available today, which we believe positions us at the center of a global revolution in autonomy.

Our four target markets each have unique use cases for our lidar sensors:

•Automotive. The automotive industry is continuing its rapid shift towards advanced/enhanced safety and autonomy features, powered by lidar. We believe we are uniquely positioned to support this transformation. We work with companies across the entire automotive ecosystem, from technology providers to direct automotive parts suppliers and original equipment manufacturers (“OEMs”), to design and manufacture lidar sensors for these advanced vehicle systems.

•Industrial. Our industrial customers use our lidar sensor to increase safety and automate operations across the global supply chain, in material handling vehicles at ports and warehouses, in off-highway vehicles in mines and on farms, and in manufacturing equipment in factories.

•Robotics. Our robotics customers are pioneering an automated future that can affect many aspects of our daily lives as they take on tasks that are redundant, cumbersome, expensive or dangerous for humans.

•Smart infrastructure. Our smart infrastructure customers are in both the public and private sector. Cities are prioritizing safety and efficiency through the use lidar technology on traffic lights and warning systems. In this sense, we believe our products can enhance public welfare through security and smart city applications. Security companies are also looking to improve intrusion detection and tracking by augmenting existing CCTV systems with the spatial tracking capabilities of lidar. We believe these markets present a significant growth opportunity for us, as they touch many aspects of our daily lives.

We envision a future where our digital technology enables lidar to become universal, playing a key role in the autonomy revolution that will change many aspects of our economy and daily lives. We believe our lidar can empower 3D perception capabilities within robots, cars, trucks and drones, as well as factories, warehouses, roads, sidewalks, public spaces, retail stores, stadiums, docks, and airport terminals. We believe our patented digital approach to lidar positions us to be at the epicenter of this societal shift, and we anticipate that our software-defined product architecture can accelerate adoption and unlock more applications for lidar in our target markets.

We believe the simplicity of our digital lidar design gives us meaningful cost advantages in manufacturing, supply chain, and production yields. Our broad software-defined customization enables us to introduce industry-specific applications and expand our product offerings with minimal changes to manufacturing or inventory. Our main manufacturing partners are Benchmark Electronics, Inc. (“Benchmark”) and Fabrinet. Benchmark and Fabrinet manufacture the majority of our products, which we expect will reduce our product costs and allow us to rapidly scale production to meet our anticipated product demand. Based on cost quotes for our products in mass production, we anticipate our manufacturing costs per unit will decrease as production volumes increase.

Our mission to make the physical world safer and more efficient is aligned with our focus on sustainability now and into the future. We believe that our lidar technology is a key enabler of sustainable solutions, empowering our customers to achieve greater levels of automation which have been shown to have the potential to significantly reduce global carbon dioxide emissions and help curb the effects of climate change. Likewise, smart city initiatives powered by lidar can better manage traffic, reduce commute times, and further reduce emissions.

On February 10, 2023, Ouster completed the merger (the “Velodyne Merger”) with Velodyne Lidar, Inc. (“Velodyne”) pursuant to the terms of the Agreement and Plan of Merger, dated as of November 4, 2022 (the “Velodyne Merger Agreement”). As a result, we currently offer two digital lidar product lines, the OS scanning sensors and the DF solid-state flash sensors, along with certain analog sensors of the Puck family and the Alpha Prime.

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Intellectual Property

We believe our success, competitive advantages, and growth prospects depend in part upon our ability to develop and protect our core technology and intellectual property. Since our inception, we have heavily invested in our patent portfolio by pursuing comprehensive coverage of invention families, use cases, and broad international coverage. Being at the forefront of innovation in the lidar market depends in part on our ability to obtain and maintain patents and other proprietary rights relating to our key technology, and our ability to successfully enforce these rights against third parties. We currently have proprietary intellectual property for both our digital and analog products, including in our embedded software, real-time 3D vision for autonomous systems, manufacturing processes and calibration methodology. We have also filed patents and trademark applications in order to further secure these rights and strengthen our ability to defend against third parties who may infringe on our rights. We also rely on trade secrets, design and manufacturing know-how, and continuing technological innovations to maintain and improve our competitive position.

As a result, we have built a portfolio of intellectual property, including issued patents and registered trademarks, copyrights, confidential technical information, and expertise in the development of lidar technology and software. As of December 31, 2023 we had 132 U.S. issued patents and 109 pending applications along with 102 foreign issued patents and 264 pending applications.

We protect our proprietary rights through agreements with our commercial partners, supply chain vendors, employees, and consultants, and by closely monitoring the developments and products in the industry; and in addition to actively seeking patent protection covering inventions originating from us, we continually evaluate opportunities to acquire or in-license patents to the extent we believe such patents are useful or relevant to our business. By leveraging our deep knowledge of lidar technology, we have invented and patented an integrated, semiconductor-based lidar technology, which for our digital products consists of the following key features:

Patented digital lidar architecture

Our patents contain a broad range of claims related to devices and methods for implementing digital lidar, among other things. Our patents cover our micro-optic technology that enables improved digital lidar performance; our digital lidar architecture combining vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (“VCSEL”) and single photon avalanche diodes (“SPAD”); our data processing circuits for in-silicon digital signal processing; and our lidar-camera convergence, combining active and passive sensing technologies. We believe these technology breakthroughs are central to our competitive advantage and dramatically improve sensor performance.

Our digital lidar systems are based on a simplified architecture that, combined with embedded software, provides high resolution and reliability for our high-performance Ouster Sensor (“OS”) and Digital Flash (“DF”) product lines. We also plan to continue to manufacture certain analog sensors of the Puck family and the Alpha Prime that we acquired from the Velodyne Merger.

Custom system-on-a-chip (“SoC”) with SPAD detectors

Our sensors contain a custom-designed SoC that replaces the functionality of hundreds of discrete analog components and integrates those capabilities onto a single complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (“CMOS”) chip.

In our OS product line, we are currently on our fifth-generation SoC, “L3”, which combines significant processing power with a 128-channel SPAD array onto a single piece of silicon and powers all of our REV7 products. Our SoC is capable of counting individual photons in order to detect very weak laser light pulses from long range targets. This digital SPAD-based approach enables our OS sensors to be compact, high-performance, and low-cost in order to provide advanced autonomy functionality to our industrial, robotics, smart infrastructure, and automotive customers.

Our DF product line currently features our first generation CMOS SoC for solid-state sensors. In 2021, we announced our second generation DF SoC, “Chronos”. Powered by this chip, the solid-state DF product line features short, medium, and long-range sensing options that we believe has the potential to meet the performance, reliability, design, and cost requirements of global automotive OEMs.

Vertical cavity surface emitting laser array

Paired with our digital SPAD SoC is an array of VCSELs. By using VCSEL technology, we can place our laser emitters into a dense array. This dense, compact approach enables us to increase our resolution without increasing the size or complexity of our sensors.

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Patented micro-optical system

In addition to our detector SoC and VCSEL array, our sensors feature patented micro-optical systems that enhance the performance of both our emitters and detectors. The combined effect of these micro-optical systems on sensor performance is equivalent to an increase in detector efficiency of multiple orders of magnitude. We believe this breakthrough intellectual property gives us significant competitive advantages over other companies.

Embedded software

Our existing embedded software is field-upgradeable, which enables us to customize and improve our sensor’s capabilities. We believe that the flexibility of this existing embedded software, together with embedded software that we develop in the future, will create an avenue for software-based enhancements of performance and customization of our products that will be capable of addressing myriad end-market customers’ specific technical requirements.

Our Product Portfolio

Using an array of eye-safe lasers, our lidar solutions measure distances in the environment at the speed of light. Unlike camera-based solutions, lidar solutions allow machines to see in 3D by providing precise distance measurements of surrounding objects. Lidar also performs better than cameras in low light conditions and produces fewer errors. Compared to radar, lidar provides better resolution, perceiving objects’ shapes for superior object detection and classification. Lidar systems are designed to detect pedestrians equally well during daytime and nighttime conditions because the systems provide self-illumination by means of laser beams.

In October of 2021, Ouster acquired Sense Photonics, Inc. (“Sense”) a developer of solid-state flash lidar based on VCSEL and SPAD technology. This acquisition enables the development of our DF sensor line which leverages technology and engineering expertise from both companies. In February 2023, Ouster merged with Velodyne, a global player in lidar sensors solutions. As a result, we currently offer two digital lidar product lines, the OS scanning sensors and the DF solid-state flash sensors, along with certain analog sensors of the Puck family and the Alpha Prime.

OS Product line

Introduced in 2018, the OS product line, based on our fifth-generation L3 SoC, is available in four different models to meet the needs of our end customers. The model options include the hemispheric field of view OSDome, the ultra-wide view “OS0,” the mid-range “OS1,” and the long-range “OS2.” Within each of these models, we offer numerous configuration options, including but not limited to different resolutions, connection standards, and data output structures. As we continue to release new generations of the silicon CMOS SoCs that power the OS product line, we expect the performance of the sensors to improve.

In October 2022, we announced the launch of our newest OS series scanning sensors, REV7, powered by our next-generation L3 chip. REV7 features the OSDome sensor, as well as upgraded OS0, OS1, and OS2 sensors that deliver double the range, enhanced object detection, increased precision and accuracy, and greater reliability. The REV7 sensors offer performance upgrades that we believe will enhance our market opportunity, driven by opportunities for longer-range and mapping applications.

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Product customization

Within our OS sensor models, we offer numerous customization options, all enabled by embedded software. The OSDome offers resolution options of 64 and 128 lines vertically (“channels”), each in a uniform beam spacing configuration. For each of our other three OS models, we offer resolution options of 128 channels, 64 channels, or 32 channels. Additionally, within the 64 and 32 channel options, we offer further customization to determine how the channels are distributed throughout the vertical field-of-view. These options for beam spacing are: uniform (evenly distributed channels), gradient (denser channels around the center of the vertical field-of-view and sparser by the top and bottom edges), below horizon (evenly spaced on the bottom half of the field of view), and above horizon (evenly spaced in the top half of the field-of-view). Illustrative beam spacing options for the OS1 model are found below:

Through our existing and future embedded software, and as a result of our enhanced operational capacity stemming from the Velodyne Merger, we anticipate offering additional customizable options to our customers. Because these configurations are offered through software, the incremental cost of additional options is lower than the cost of designing new hardware, giving us the operational flexibility to respond to evolving market demands.

DF product line

The DF series is a suite of short, mid, and long-range solid-state digital lidar sensors with superior reliability, durability, and affordability. The DF series is designed to meet automaker requirements and certifications for advanced driver assistance systems (“ADAS”) and autonomous driving, while seamlessly integrating into the vehicle architecture and design. The DF series is also suitable for non-ADAS use cases where a full 360 degree field of view is not required.

Its key features include high resolution sensors, adaptability, and scalability.

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High resolution. The patented breakthrough solid-state digital flash architecture produces high-resolution 3D point clouds.

Adaptability. The multi-sensor suite is a flexible platform that can be easily adapted to different form-factors and sensor configurations to provide varying ranges, fields of view, and vehicle design freedoms – all with a simple change in optics or housing.

Scalability. The solid-state DF product line is highly manufacturable and offers the durability, reliability, and affordability needed for automotive series production. We expect to offer individual solid-state sensors as well as a multi-sensor lidar suite at a price point that we believe could enable broad adoption in consumer vehicles. We believe that we are well-positioned to deliver on OEM requirements with a single supplier offering, reducing overall costs and making us a preferred potential partner for both automotive OEMs and Tier 1s.

Velodyne product lines

We also offer certain surround-view lidar sensors that Velodyne previously marketed prior to our merger with Velodyne in February 2023. These products are listed below and support numerous end applications, including autonomous vehicles, drones, security, mobile robots and mapping.

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Ouster Gemini

Ouster Gemini is a perception platform designed for smart infrastructure deployments like security and crowd analytics, and is optimized exclusively for Ouster’s digital lidar sensors. The Gemini platform consists of OS series lidar sensors, edge processor hardware, perception software, and cloud analytics.

The Ouster Gemini platform provides people and object detection, classification, and tracking for actionable, intuitive, and customizable insights while preserving personally identifiable information. Gemini enables our customers to detect, classify, and track objects through a covered area which can be expanded by meshing lidar sensors together to form a single, cohesive 3D view. This approach has multiple advantages compared to other similar solutions and can be used to replace or enhance existing camera, radar, or RF beacon-based systems:

Detection accuracy. Gemini perception software is specifically optimized to take advantage of the rich and robust data provided by Ouster’s digital lidar sensors. The high resolution and improved range of our digital lidar sensors combined with a state of the art deep neural network based perception algorithms enhance the detection, classification, and tracking accuracy of the perception software.

Uninterrupted tracking. Gemini enables seamless tracking of objects across an entire area. Users can easily mesh multiple lidar sensors together within the Gemini software interface, allowing a seamless 3D view of object movement throughout the space. Each sensor provides ten times more coverage than a camera based system.

Easy setup and administration. The simplicity of the Gemini platform, along with its intuitive user interface, enables customers to install, configure, and maintain the system with ease.

Privacy-preserving. Gemini does not output any personally identifiable information, allowing customers to deploy advanced monitoring systems in public or sensitive areas without privacy concerns.

Blue City

Blue City is a Gemini-powered solution for traffic operations, planning, and safety. Blue City provides real-time data analytics and predictions, which can be used to improve traffic and crowd flow efficiency, improve urban planning, advance sustainability, and protect vulnerable road users in a wide range of weather and lighting conditions.

Improve flow efficiency. Connecting Blue City’s intelligent solution to existing traffic controllers helps optimize signal timing and traffic and crowd flow based on real-time, multimodal traffic data. This can result in reduced traffic congestion, decreased vehicle delays, and maximized system capacity.

Improve urban planning. Blue City can help improve mobility and urban growth management for all modes of transport with data-based decision-making insights on the volume, speed, and direction of pedestrians, cyclists, and vehicles.

Data analytics dashboard. Blue City provides a user dashboard with actionable insights such as number of near misses, pedestrian crossing time estimates, illegal turn detection, and red-light violations.

Product Roadmap And Development

We currently expect that our future digital lidar product developments will be primarily driven by improvements to our semiconductors—the receiver SoC and VCSEL laser array— with little to no impact on the designs or architecture of our sensors.

We expect to maintain our OS product line with our four current sensor models. Our product roadmap primarily consists of designing, building, and integrating improved semiconductors into the OS product line, which we anticipate will improve the range and resolution of our sensors, among other features, without substantial changes to the form factor of our sensors.

We have manufactured prototypes of our DF product line for the automotive ADAS market. After the initial release, we anticipate our DF product line will improve in performance over time as we improve our core SoC and laser components.

Our Customers

We target four markets globally: automotive, industrial, robotics, and smart infrastructure. For the year ended December 31, 2023, no single customer accounted for more than 10% of our revenue from product sales.

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Automotive

Our customers in the automotive industry fall into two categories: customers developing various forms of self-driving technology for driverless mobility and freight applications, and customers developing consumer ADAS. Both groups are generally engaged in the design, production, manufacture, operation, or after-market modification of automobiles, which includes consumer and commercial vehicles, commercial heavy trucks, and buses among other vehicles. Automotive customers use lidar as a core component in ADAS and for autonomous driving. We believe that our automotive customers value the high resolution, high reliability, and cost of our lidar technology. During the fiscal year ended December 31, 2023, a single customer developing level 4 autonomous vehicles accounted for more than 10% of our bookings in 2023.

Industrial Automation

Our customers in the industrial market are generally engaged in the manufacturing, operation, or after-market modification of heavy industrial machinery, which includes automated guided vehicles (“AGVs”), autonomous mobile robots (“AMRs”), mining vehicles, large material handling vehicles such as forklifts, construction vehicles, agricultural vehicles, and port machinery among other machines. Lidar is used on heavy machinery to enable autonomous usage of the machinery and to improve worker safety. We believe that our industrial customers value the high resolution, range, small form factor, and high reliability of our digital lidar sensors.

Robotics

Our customers in the robotics industry are generally engaged in the design, production, operation, or after-market modification of small mobile human-less vehicles, which includes wheeled robots, legged robots, and drones among other vehicles. Our customers in the robotics market include both commercial entities and nonprofit entities, such as research institutions. Our customers in the robotics market are installing lidar sensors for autonomous navigation, collision avoidance, and mapping in order to provide services such as last-mile delivery, street sweeping, and asset inspection. We believe our robotics customers value the high resolution, precision, wide vertical field-of-view, and high reliability of our lidar sensors.

Smart Infrastructure

Our customers in the smart infrastructure market are generally engaged in monitoring and analyzing human and vehicle movements for the purpose of providing building security and improving roadway safety and efficiency. This market includes federal, state, and local governments as well as private commercial businesses. Unlike traditional cameras, our lidar sensors provide accurate spatial data in low lighting conditions while safeguarding privacy concerns. We believe that our smart infrastructure customers value the high resolution, 360° horizontal field-of-view, and high reliability of our digital lidar sensors. Powered by our lidar sensors and software solutions, our products provide smart infrastructure customers the ability to detect, classify, and track people and vehicles through an easy to use software user interface, allowing them to interact with lidar data indirectly and in a task-relevant manner.

Our Competitive Strengths

We believe the following strengths will allow us to maintain and extend our position as a leading provider in high-resolution lidar solutions.

Patented digital lidar technology

Since we invented and patented our digital lidar technology in 2015, we have launched a suite of products built on a shared architecture. Our proprietary SoC replaces hundreds to thousands of discrete components with a single tightly integrated SPAD receiver array, and our high-efficiency VCSEL array integrates every laser into a single die. Moreover, our patented micro-optical system increases digital lidar performance by the equivalent of an orders-of-magnitude increase in detector efficiency. We believe that this architecture will allow us to continue to increase sensor performance while reducing its cost for many years to come. The Sense acquisition and the Velodyne Merger have enabled us to acquire additional intellectual property, which we believe will continue to distinguish us in the lidar space.

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High performance at an affordable price

As we introduce future generations of our proprietary SoC, we expect to be able to offer improved resolution, range, precision, reliability, and unlock new data types. Our simple digital architecture shared across our products results in a single manufacturing process and common supply chain for all of our sensor models that we believe results in cost advantages that help us offer lower prices to our customers while maintaining gross margins.

Flexible and scalable product architecture

Our products employ a software-defined architecture, enabling rapid customization in the software layer, and a simple shared hardware architecture for scalable manufacturing. With software-defined products continuing to drive low-cost customization, we expect to develop new industry-specific applications, expanding our product offering without requiring significant manufacturing or inventory changes.

Large and diversified customer base

We continue to diversify our customer base by solidifying our presence in automotive, industrial, robotics, and smart infrastructure, which we believe gives us key advantages. First, our customer and market diversity add stability to our business and we are able to reduce our exposure to the risk of development delays or regulatory changes that may affect our sales to a single customer or in a particular market. Second, we believe that a large, diverse customer base will ultimately result in more engaged customers purchasing our products and help us to achieve higher sales more quickly than other companies that depend on a smaller set of customers in fewer markets. As we increase our sales volume, we expect our cost per sensor to decrease, allowing us to compete more effectively in each of the targeted markets.

Volume manufacturing today

To achieve our vision of making lidar technology widely adopted, we designed our technology for high-volume manufacturing. We outsource certain product lines to our manufacturing partners Benchmark and Fabrinet, both of which have manufacturing facilities in Thailand. We believe these relationships provide multiple benefits, including allowing us to reduce our operating costs and the ability to leverage our partners’ manufacturing capacity to quickly respond to changes in demand.

Digital solid-state technology positioned to capture automotive scale

We expect that our prospective ADAS customers will select lidar suppliers primarily based on the anticipated ability to meet performance, reliability, design, and cost requirements. We believe that the solid-state digital lidar technology in our DF sensors will meet these performance, reliability, design, and cost requirements of ADAS, and lead to production wins and growth in this segment.

Highly reliable and rugged technology

In addition to high performance, comparatively low cost, and high customization flexibility, our sensors are designed to be highly reliable. Our OS product line of sensors have achieved the highest ingress ratings in the industry—IP68 and IP69K—meaning they can survive submersion in up to 1 meter of water for 30 minutes and withstand high-temperature power washing. We believe Ouster has one of the lowest field failure rates in the industry, which reduces the total cost of ownership of our sensors.

Visionary management team

Innovation is central to our corporate culture. Ouster’s co-founders Angus Pacala and Mark Frichtl have over two decades of combined experience in lidar engineering. In collaboration with our seasoned executive management team, they drive our vision and corporate strategy. We believe that the digital lidar technology invented by our founders will continue to drive significant improvements in autonomous technology. As the Company has developed, we have built a strong supporting team, adding leaders in sales, marketing, operations, engineering, manufacturing, legal, and finance.

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Our Growth Strategies

Our growth strategy is based upon three components: the attractive performance and cost economics of our digital lidar technology, accelerating adoption with our software solutions, and focused commercial execution.

Today, our digital lidar technology powers OS and DF sensors that are high performance, highly customizable, reliable, and cost competitive. As we continue to upgrade the SoCs powering our OS and DF sensors, we expect to improve the performance of our sensors without significant negative impact to sensor cost or form factor. We plan to leverage this dynamic to grow our sensor sales by steadily improving our product performance while consistently maintaining a competitive price point.

We believe our software solutions for multiple end markets present a significant growth opportunity. For existing lidar users, software has the potential to decrease development time and improve system performance. For customers who historically rely on other sensor modalities or lack technical expertise, the introduction of software such as Ouster Gemini can catalyze the adoption of lidar by lowering the engineering resources required to transform raw data into actionable insights.

In addition to our sensor and software growth opportunities, we believe we can increase our growth through commercial execution excellence. By building a commercial organization with highly-skilled employees and efficient processes and systems, we believe we can improve our customer acquisition, accelerate existing customer growth, increase sales through distribution networks, and build valuable strategic partnerships.

Key elements of our growth strategy include:

Execute on our product roadmap

We continue to place a priority on innovation and product development. We plan to continue improving our product performance and adding unique functionality while maintaining a competitive price point. We believe that improving our products at a consistently competitive price positions us to win new and expanded business opportunities in our target markets over time.

Grow sales volumes from existing accounts

We aim to create an established customer base in each of our four target markets that can be further strengthened as our relationships with customers mature. As our customers move through our pipeline from benchtop evaluation to pilot evaluation, to pre-production, and finally to production—we believe our order volumes will increase at each stage in the sales process. We expect that moving to series production can provide a material increase of up to several orders of magnitude in annual sales volume for a given customer program.

Commercialize digital lidar for emerging automotive opportunities

We believe that our cost-reduced solid-state DF sensor will meet the automotive industry’s requirements for performance, cost, and reliability in ADAS applications. As development progresses, we will strive to build and maintain relationships with global automotive OEMs and Tier 1s to further strengthen demand.

Expand our distribution network

While the majority of our sales are direct to customers, we also sell our sensors through a domestic and international distribution network, which has expanded as a result of the Velodyne Merger. We believe these distributors enable us to reach more end customers in an operationally efficient manner. We plan to grow our existing network and establish new distribution partnerships in regions where we do not currently have partnerships. By leveraging these relationships, we believe we will be able to reach more customers faster and rapidly grow our sales.

Expand our partner ecosystem

Effectively integrating and using a lidar sensor can be a complex task for some end customers. An ecosystem of value-added software and integrator companies is growing across the world, offering perception software and tailored solutions for our target markets. We have relationships with many of these companies, and have collaborated with some of them to develop software and services based on our sensors. We intend to further develop complementary solutions and integration services that we believe will provide potential customers with the requisite technical know-how and we expect that this will accelerate our sales growth.

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Strengthen our worldwide sales and marketing presence

To further grow our market share in our target markets, we intend to opportunistically scale our commercial team to serve the needs of each end market. As our market presence grows through targeted sales and marketing activity, we believe our customer base will grow. In addition, we are increasingly cross-selling within accounts, accessing new projects and opportunities within accounts where we have a beachhead position and increasing the number of addressable opportunities.

Pursue strategic transactions

We have explored and may continue to explore strategic acquisitions, mergers or other transactions as a means to improve our competitive position. For example, in February 2023, we completed our merger of equals with Velodyne which helped us to strengthen our financial position, technology portfolio and software offering. While we see significant and growing demand for our products today, we believe such transactions can create more expansive use cases for our products, provide greater access to target markets, improve our operating efficiency, or accelerate our product roadmap.

Manufacturing

We have invested a significant amount of time and resources in streamlining our production process. Our current key manufacturing partners are Benchmark and Fabrinet, with whom we have had established relationships for multiple years. Our optical alignment processes are partially or completely automated, which reduces manufacturing time and increases our production output. Our sensors also undergo application-focused final testing, which allows us to understand the real-world performance of our sensors before they are shipped to customers. We continue to invest in building manufacturing process control systems, which provide real-time production information on the sensors produced in Thailand through integrated data stores and dashboards. This streamlined production process aims at lowering manufacturing costs.

Competition

There is an increasing demand for lidar to help advance automated systems with the intended goal of increasing safety, improving efficiency and enhancing productivity. Lidar’s status as a critical sensor in many applications gives us the opportunity to add enhanced value to customers by providing comprehensive solutions. There is increasing adoption of lidar across a wide variety of industries. As a result, we compete against several companies developing lidar solutions for incorporation into these developing applications, some of which may be similar to ours. Our competitors may include and are not limited to: AEye, Aeva Inc., Cepton Technologies, Innoviz Technologies, Hesai Technology, Luminar Technologies, MicroVision, Pepperl+Fuchs, Quanergy, RoboSense, Seyond, and SICK.

Additionally, some of our targeted customers may have their own internal lidar development programs. Our software products may also compete against companies that provide standalone software solutions. Although we believe our line of products and innovation support position us as a leader in the lidar market, we will continue to face competition from existing, established market competitors with greater resources and new companies developing lidar solutions.

Sales And Marketing

We maintain a global sales presence across the Americas, Europe, Middle East and Asia-Pacific markets. We sell directly to the majority of our customers and have also developed a global network of active distributors to sell, install and support our solutions. Our commercial team is made up of experienced leaders who have been developing a focused sales organization geared towards ramping our sales pipeline. We continue to maintain a robust sales and marketing team to meet the demands of our existing customers and expect to expand our sales efforts to attract new customers. We plan to continue to expand and optimize our dealer network to ensure that we have sufficient geographic coverage across both existing and new markets.

We take a targeted marketing approach to each of our four focused markets. We develop and publish digital content designed to educate our audience on how to use Ouster’s products, and selectively use other channels and advertising methods to attract customers. We leverage opportunities to present and speak at market-specific conferences, executive events, trade shows and industry events to further develop our brand and reputation. These opportunities also allow us to showcase our technology and attract additional customer interest. Through customer feedback, industry events and strategic relationships, we continue to identify the evolving needs of our customers and, as a result, develop new and improved solutions. In addition, we have a robust social media presence and are investing in various digital marketing strategies and tools to further reach customers as well as build our brand. From time to time, we sponsor universities and other non-profit organizations to increase awareness of our technology and showcase its capabilities.

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Research and Development

We have invested significant resources into research and development of our lidar-based technologies. We believe our ability to maintain a leadership position depends in part on our ongoing research and development activities.

Our research and development activities are primarily based in San Francisco, California; Ottawa, Canada; and Edinburgh, Scotland. Our research and development team is responsible for the design, development, manufacturing and testing of our products. We focus our efforts on the development of digital lidar technology, software functionality, solutions, and innovative manufacturing technologies. The research and development team also partners with our operations and supply chain teams to develop scalable and reliable manufacturing processes and aid in supply chain planning and diversification. Our team consists of engineers, technicians, scientists, operators and professionals with experience from a wide variety of the world’s leading sensing, engineering, consumer electronics, and automotive organizations.

Government Regulation

While the U.S. has historically provided a positive legal landscape that allows safe testing and development of autonomous features, with nuances that vary from state to state, we are subject to the non-exhaustive list of regulations set forth below.

As a lidar technology company, we are subject to the Electronic Product Radiation Control Provisions of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. These requirements are enforced by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”). Electronic product radiation includes laser technology. Regulations governing these products are intended to protect the public from hazardous or unnecessary exposure. Manufacturers are required to certify in product labeling and report to the FDA that their products comply with applicable performance standards as well as maintain manufacturing, testing and distribution records for their products. Furthermore, we are also subject to similar internationally harmonized standards and regulations governing the safe use of laser products. Based upon successful evaluations of the applicable laser products, followed by written attestation by international third-party certification agencies, manufacturers are required to create Self Declarations of Compliance (“SDOC”) of their products to such regulations, and label their products accordingly.

Our products and solutions are also subject to U.S. and foreign trade and customs product classifications, including the U.S. Export Administration Regulations, U.S. Customs regulations and various economic and trade sanctions regulations administered by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Controls. U.S. export control laws and regulations and economic sanctions prohibit the shipment of certain products and services to countries, governments, and persons targeted by U.S. sanctions.

Similarly, we are also subject to sourcing regulations such as the requirements under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 and the EU Conflict Minerals Regulation 2017/821, that require us to carefully monitor our supply chain. Adherence to these requirements could adversely affect the sourcing, availability and pricing of the materials that may be used in the manufacture of components used in our products.

Our customers may use our products in applications that are regulated and/or subject to industry standards. Such applications require that our products comply with the applicable regulations and standards, including, but not limited to, functional safety, cybersecurity, product safety and product performance standards. For example, we continue to add features to our existing OS line, and we expect to design, engineer and test our new DF product line, to meet evolving U.S. and international consumer product safety and performance requirements as well as Automotive and Industrial Functional Safety, Cybersecurity and performance certifications designed to ensure the safe deployment and operation of autonomous vehicles, automotive ADAS, industrial machines and robots. Significant foreign markets also continue to develop their own respective standards to define deployment requirements for higher levels of autonomy in these jurisdictions.

Our operations are subject to various international, federal, state and local laws and regulations governing the occupational health and safety of our employees and wage regulations. We are subject to the requirements of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, as amended, (“OSHA”), and comparable international, state and local laws that protect and regulate employee health and safety.

Similar to companies operating in industries similar to ours, we are subject to environmental regulation, including water use, air emissions, use of recycled materials, energy sources, the storage, handling, treatment, transportation and disposal of hazardous materials and the remediation of environmental contamination. Compliance with these laws, rules and regulations may include permits, licenses and inspections of our facilities and products.

Finally, the SEC recently adopted rules that will require companies to provide certain climate-related disclosures. While we are still assessing the scope and impact of this rule given how recently it was adopted, we anticipate that this rule, as well as other ESG and sustainability-related regulation and legislation, may require us to incur significant additional costs to comply, including the implementation of significant additional internal controls and impose increased oversight obligations on our management and board of directors.

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Human Capital

As of December 31, 2023, we employed 202 people on a full-time basis in the United States and 88 people on a full-time basis internationally, either directly through our international subsidiaries or through a professional employer organization. We also engaged a certain number of consultants and independent contractors to supplement our permanent workforce. None of our employees are currently represented by a labor union or covered by collective bargaining agreements. We believe we have strong and positive relations with our employees.

Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging. To attract, motivate and retain a highly-skilled workforce throughout our organization, we are focused on facilitating a safe and inclusive work environment that leverages the capabilities of our employees and encourages diversity of thought. In furtherance of these objectives, we provide Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging training for our employees to promote a healthy and inclusive organizational culture.

Employee engagement. We prioritize employee engagement and value employee feedback, which we gauge through an annual employee engagement survey that helps us monitor both engagement and satisfaction and provides an additional reference point for evaluating initiatives aimed at enhancing our employees’ experience.

Compensation and Benefits. We offer what we consider attractive compensation and benefit packages, which may include depending on location and eligibility, annual bonuses, paid time-off, 401(k) and Company match (subject to the IRS annual limit), stock awards, employee stock purchase plans, health and wellness programs and other benefits. Our long-term equity compensation is intended to align management interests with those of our stockholders and to encourage the creation of long-term value.

Additional Information

Our Internet address is https://ouster.com. At our Investor Relations website, https://investors.ouster.com, we make available free of charge a variety of information for investors, including our Annual Reports on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K and any amendments to those reports, as soon as reasonably practicable after we electronically file that material with or furnish it to the SEC. Our filings with the SEC can also be accessed through the SEC’s website at http://www.sec.gov. Our website and the information included in or linked to our website are not part of this Annual Report on Form 10-K or any other report we file with, or furnish to, the SEC.

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Item 1A. Risk Factors

Our business involves significant risks and uncertainties, some of which are described below. You should carefully consider the risks and uncertainties described below, together with all of the other information contained in this Annual Report on Form 10-K. The realization of any of these risks and uncertainties could have a material adverse effect on our reputation, business, financial condition, results of operations, growth and future prospects as well as our ability to accomplish our strategic objectives. In that event, the market price of our common stock could decline and you could lose part or all of your investment.

Risks Related to Our Business and Industry

Our limited operating history makes it difficult to evaluate our future prospects and the risks and challenges we may encounter.

Our company has a limited operating history, having been in operation since 2015. Our limited operating history makes it difficult for us to evaluate our future prospects. Certain factors that could alone or in combination prevent us from successfully commercializing our products include:

•our reliance on third parties to manufacture our products or supply significant parts needed for our production process;

•our ability to establish and maintain successful relationships with our manufacturers and suppliers;

•our ability to tailor our commercial production depending on scale and on a cost-effective basis in a timely manner;

•our ability to successfully expand our product offerings;

•our ability to develop and protect intellectual property;

•our ability to gain market acceptance of our products with customers and maintain and expand customer relationships;

•the adaptability of our products and the ability of our customers to integrate our products into their products in a timely and effective manner;

•the actions of direct and indirect competitors that may seek to enter the markets in which we expect to compete or that may seek to impose barriers to one or more markets that we intend to target;

•the long-lead time for development of market opportunities, for which we are only at an early stage of development;

•our ability to forecast our revenue, budget, and manage our expenses;

•our ability to comply with existing and new or modified local laws and regulations applicable to our business, or laws and regulations applicable to our customers for applications in which they may use our products;

•our ability to plan for and manage capital expenditures for our current and future products, and manage our supply chain and supplier relationships related to these current and future products;

•our ability to anticipate and respond to macroeconomic changes and changes in the markets in which we operate and expect to operate;

•our ability to maintain and enhance the value of our reputation and brand;

•our ability to effectively manage our growth and business operations; and

•our ability to recruit and retain talented people at all levels of our organization.

If we fail to understand fully or adequately address the challenges that we are currently encountering or that we may encounter in the future, including those challenges described here and elsewhere in this Part I, Item 1A. “Risk Factors,” our business, financial condition and results of operations could be adversely and materially affected. If the risks and uncertainties that we plan for when operating our business are incorrect or change, or if we fail to manage these risks successfully, our results of operations could differ materially from our expectations and our business, financial condition and results of operations could be adversely affected.

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Our future results will suffer if we do not recognize anticipated synergies, effectively manage the expanded operations or successfully integrate the businesses of Velodyne.

Our future success will depend, in part, upon our ability to manage the expanded business, including challenges related to the management and monitoring of new operations and associated increased costs and complexity associated with the Velodyne Merger and other mergers. If we are not able to successfully complete integrations in an efficient and cost-effective manner, the anticipated benefits of this merger may not be realized fully, or at all, or may take longer to realize than expected, and the value of our common stock may be affected adversely. An inability to realize the full extent of the anticipated benefits of the Velodyne Merger, as well as any delays encountered in the integration processes, could have an adverse effect on our business, financial condition or results of operations. In addition, the actual integrations may result in additional and unforeseen expenses, including increased legal, accounting and compliance costs.

We have incurred significant losses to date and may never achieve or sustain profitability.

We have experienced net losses in each year since our inception. In the years ended December 31, 2023 and 2022, we incurred net losses of $374.1 million and $138.6 million, respectively. We expect to continue to incur losses for the foreseeable future as we expand our product offering and continue to scale our commercial operations and research and development program. As of December 31, 2023, we had an accumulated deficit of $816.0 million. Even if we are able to increase the sales of our products, there can be no assurance that we will be profitable.

We expect we will continue to incur significant losses for the foreseeable future as we:

•hire additional personnel, as needed, to support investments in research and development (“R&D”), in order to develop technology and related software and to support the compliance needs in connection with being a public company;

•increase our sales and marketing functions, including expansion of our customer support and distribution capabilities;

•continue to integrate the operations of Velodyne following our recent merger; and

•expand operations and manufacturing.

If our products do not achieve sufficient market acceptance, we will not become profitable. If we fail to become profitable, or if we are unable to fund our business we may be unable to continue our operations. There can be no assurance that we will ever achieve or sustain profitability.

We expect to incur substantial R&D costs and devote significant resources to developing and commercializing new products, which could significantly affect our ability to become profitable and may not result in revenue to us. Any delay or interruption of the development and commercialization of new products may adversely affect our existing business and prospects for securing future business.

Our future growth depends on penetrating new markets, adapting existing products to new applications and customer requirements, and introducing new and effective products at an opportune time that may then achieve market acceptance. To remain competitive, we continue to develop new products and expand our existing product offerings. For instance, in October 2022, we announced our newest OS series scanning sensor, REV7,powered by its next-generation L3 chip. REV7 features the all-new OSDome sensor, as well as upgraded OS0, OS1, and OS2 sensors that deliver double the range, enhanced object detection, increased precision and accuracy, and greater reliability. introduced the market. In January 2023, we announced the release of our software, Ouster Gemini, a cloud-backed digital lidar perception platform for crowd analytics, security, and intelligent transportation systems. Ouster Gemini offers the ability to detect, classify, and track moving objects in real-time using the 3D data from a single or multiple fused Ouster lidar sensors. In connection with REV7, Ouster Gemini, and future releases, we expect to incur substantial, and potentially increasing, R&D costs. Our R&D expenses were $91.2 million and $64.3 million during the years ended December 31, 2023 and 2022, respectively, and are likely to grow in the future, particularly as a result of the Velodyne Merger. Because we account for R&D as an operating expense, these expenditures will adversely affect our results of operations in the future.

Further, our R&D program may be delayed and may not produce timely results. If we cannot produce successful results in time to accommodate customers’ or potential customers’ development timelines, we may lose business. If we are unsuccessful in introducing these products in accordance with our product launch plans or any publicly announced launch dates, it may be injurious to our reputation and brand and adversely affect our ability to be competitive in our four target markets and potential new markets. In launching such products, we may face foreseen and unforeseen difficulties that adversely affect such commercialization and could have a material adverse effect on our operations and business. Additionally, the success of our competitors’ R&D efforts, including producing higher performing products or providing products competitive to our new products to our customers before us, may result in loss of business to us.

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The promise of new products and successful R&D may even decrease our expected and actual revenue attributable to existing products, as historically, customers have delayed or cancelled outstanding purchasing commitments for certain products in anticipation of the release of new generation products from the Company. There is no guarantee that these delays and cancellations will not occur again in the future as we develop, announce and commercialize new products like our DF solid-state lidar sensor or our complementary software solutions.

If we are unable to overcome our limited sales history and establish and maintain confidence in our long-term business prospects among customers in our target markets or if our revenue opportunity does not materialize into sales and revenue, then our financial condition, operating results, business prospects and access to capital may suffer materially.

Our company has a limited sales history, as we only commenced selling our first revenue grade products in late 2018. Because of our limited sales history, we have limited experience managing and growing our relationships with existing customers and securing new customers in our target industries.

Our relationships with many of our existing customers are limited as they may not be prepared to select Ouster as a long-term supplier given our limited operating and sales history. To establish preliminary relationships with certain customers and to build their confidence, we have entered, and may continue to enter, into evaluation agreements, spot buy purchase orders, non-binding letters of intent, and strategic customer agreements. These agreements are largely non-binding, do not include any minimum obligation to purchase any quantities of any products at this time, and do not require that the parties enter into a subsequent definitive, long-term, binding agreements; however, these preliminary agreements assist the Company in building confidence with customers if we are able to effectively perform and otherwise maintain positive relationships with them. If we are unable to build confidence with our existing customers, either through these preliminary agreements (due to any failure to enter into or perform under the agreements) or otherwise, or if we are unable to secure opportunities from these non-binding agreements, including those involving strategic customers,we may be unable to produce accurate forecasts or become profitable.

Our new customers, or customers that we inherited from the Velodyne Merger, may be less confident in us and less likely to purchase our products because of a lack of awareness about our products. They may also not be convinced that our business will succeed because of the absence of an established sales, service, support, and operating history. To address this, we must, among other activities, grow and improve our marketing capability and brand awareness, which may be costly. These activities may not be effective or could delay our ability to capitalize on the opportunities that we believe are suitable to our technology and products and may prevent us from successfully commercializing our products.

To build and maintain our business, we must maintain confidence in our products, long-term financial viability and business prospects. Failure to establish and maintain customer confidence may also adversely affect our reputation and business among our suppliers, analysts, ratings agencies, stockholders and other interested parties.

Our operating results may fluctuate significantly, which makes our future operating results difficult to predict and could cause our operating results to fall below expectations or any guidance we may provide and could cause our stock price to fluctuate or decline.

Our quarterly and annual operating results may fluctuate significantly, which makes it difficult for us to predict our future operating results. Our financial results may fluctuate as a result of a variety of factors, including:

•the timing of ultimate end market and customer adoption of our products and particular versions of our products;

•the varying length of production cycles for our customers to integrate our products into their broader platforms;

•supply chain constraints and considerations and impacts on our costs of goods sold, such as shortages of semiconductor chips;

•our product mix and average selling prices, including negotiated selling prices and long-term customer agreements;

•the cost of raw materials or supplied components critical for the manufacture of our products;

•the timing and cost of, and level of investment in, research and development relating to our digital lidar technology and related software;

•developments involving our competitors;

•changes in governmental regulations affecting us or applications in which our customers use our products or software;

•future accounting pronouncements or changes in our accounting policies;

•the impact of epidemics or pandemics, including current or future business disruption and related financial impact resulting from the global COVID-19 health crisis;

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•adverse litigation, judgments, settlements or other litigation-related costs, or claims that may give rise to such costs; and

•general market conditions and other factors, including factors unrelated to our operating performance or the operating performance of our competitors.

Many of these factors are outside of our control and may not accurately reflect the underlying performance of our business. The individual or cumulative effects of factors discussed above could result in large fluctuations and unpredictability in our quarterly and annual operating results. As a result, comparing our operating results on a period-to-period basis may not be meaningful.

This variability and unpredictability could also result in our failing to meet the expectations of industry or financial analysts or investors for any period. If our revenue or operating results fall below the expectations of analysts or investors or below any guidance we may provide, or if the guidance we provide is below the expectations of analysts or investors, the price of our common stock could decline substantially. Such a stock price decline could occur even if our performance is consistent with any previously publicly stated guidance.

Our revenue and margins could be adversely affected if we fail to maintain competitive average selling prices, high sales volumes, and/or fail to reduce product costs.

Cost-cutting initiatives adopted by our customers often place increased downward pressure on our average selling prices. We also expect that any long term or high-volume agreements with customers may require step-downs in pricing over the term of the agreement or, if commercialized, over the period of production. We strive to keep our average selling price competitive and expect to achieve profitability by maintaining competitive average sales prices and through continually lower product costs. Our average selling price may be driven down by customer-specific selling price fluctuations such as non-standard discounts on large volume purchases. These lower average selling prices on large volume purchases may cause fluctuations in revenue and gross margins on a quarterly and annual basis and ultimately adversely affect our profitability. We have experienced and may in the future experience declines in the average selling prices of our products generally as our customers seek to commercialize autonomous systems at prices low enough to achieve market acceptance and as our competitors continue to produce and commercialize lower cost competing technologies. To achieve profitability and maintain margins, we will also need to continually reduce product and manufacturing costs. Reductions in product and manufacturing costs are principally achieved by scaling our production volumes and through step changes in manufacturing and continued engineering of the most cost-effective designs for our products. Further, as we continue to provide support for REV6, we anticipate downward pressure on our margins. In addition, we must continuously drive initiatives to reduce labor cost, improve worker efficiency, reduce the cost of materials and further lower overall product costs by carefully managing component prices, inventory and shipping cost. We need to continually increase sales volume and introduce new, lower-cost products in order to maintain our overall gross margin. If we are unable to maintain competitive average selling prices, increase our sales volume or successfully introduce new, low-cost products, our revenue and overall gross margin will likely decline.

We compete against established market participants that have substantially greater resources than us and against known and unknown market entrants who may disrupt our target markets.

Our target markets are highly competitive and we may not be able to compete effectively in the market against these competitors. Competitors may offer lidar products at lower prices than ours, including pricing that we believe is below their cost, or may offer superior performing lidar products. These companies also compete with us indirectly by attempting to solve some of the same challenges with different technology. Established competitors in the market for lidar sensors have significantly greater resources and more experience than we do. These competitors have commercialized lidar technology that has achieved market adoption, strong brand recognition and may continue to improve in both anticipated and unanticipated ways. They may also have entered into commercial relationships with key customers and have built relationships and dependencies between themselves and those key customers.

In addition to current market competitors, new competitors may enter the lidar market or create products that function as an alternative to lidar, which may disrupt the commercial landscape of our target markets in ways that we may not be able to adapt to adequately or in a timely fashion.The already competitive landscape of the lidar market, including both foreseeable and unforeseeable entries of competitors and lidar technology from those competitors in our target markets, along with the potential emergence of new non-lidar solutions, may result in downward pricing pressure, reduced margins and may impede our ability to increase the sales of our products or cause us to lose market share, any of which will adversely affect our business, results of operations and financial condition.

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We target many customers that are large corporations with substantial negotiating power and exacting product standards. If we are unable to sell our products to these customers, our prospects and results of operations will be adversely affected.

Many of our current and potential customers are large corporations that often possess significant leverage over their suppliers, and can successfully demand contract terms favorable to themselves, such as reserving the right to terminate their supply contracts for convenience. The disparities in negotiating power between us and larger corporations have required, and may require in the future, that we accept less favorable contract terms. These large corporations also have exacting technical specifications and requirements that we have been unable to, and may continue to be unable to, meet, thereby precluding our ability to secure sales. Meeting the technical requirements to secure and maintain significant contracts with any of these companies will require a substantial investment of our time and resources, and if we fail to comply with our customers’ technical specifications and standards, we may lose existing and future business. Even when we succeed in securing contracts, these large companies have required, and may require in the future, evolving technical specifications for our products and may terminate our agreement or make a later determination that our products are not satisfactory, and even set a standard for the industry that we may not be able to meet. We therefore have no assurance that we can establish relationships with these companies, that our products will meet the needs of these or other companies, or that a contract with these companies will culminate in significant or any product sales.

Furthermore, in some instances, these large companies may have internally developed products and solutions that are competitive to our products. These companies may have substantial research and development resources, which may allow them to acquire or develop independently, or in partnership with others, competitive technologies. Such activities may foreclose significant sales opportunities for our products.

If our products are not selected for inclusion in our target markets, our business will be materially and adversely affected.

Although our products are designed for use in multiple markets, each of our target or new markets may have unique features and demands. If we are unsuccessful in meeting this demand, it may affect our entrance into these target or new markets which could adversely affect our future results of operations.

Our products are used in a wide variety of existing and emerging use cases in the industrial market, where our target customers are generally engaged in the manufacturing, operation, or after-market modification of heavy industrial machinery. These customers tend to be large companies that move slowly to larger scale production, often with years-long timelines. If our products are not chosen for deployment in these projects, or we lose a program under any circumstances, we may not have an opportunity to obtain that business again for many years. Industrial automation is a demanding industry with product specifications that our products may not always meet.

Our products also are used in a wide variety of existing and emerging use cases in the smart infrastructure market, which generally consists of public bodies and private commercial businesses engaging in the monitoring and analysis of pedestrian and vehicle movements for the purpose of providing building security, improving road user safety, and increasing roadway efficiency. This is still a nascent market, and while this industry is experimenting with the use of lidar in these applications, our customers may decide that lidar is not a viable solution for a variety of reasons, including price points, interoperability, and integration of lidar sensors. Customers in this market are often local governments, such as city governments, which may be subject to political pressures, and may not control their own budgets. For example, programs could be cancelled due to legislative action that is out of a local government’s control.

Our products also may be purchased by automotive OEMs and their suppliers in connection with their design and development of autonomous driving and ADAS technology. These programs are time and resource intensive, requiring thousands of man hours and several years. Automotive OEMs and suppliers undertake extensive testing or qualification processes prior to placing orders for large quantities of products such as ours, because such products will function as part of a larger system or platform and must meet other specifications. We spend significant time and resources to pursue the business of having our products selected by automotive OEMs and their suppliers for use in the manufacture of a particular vehicle model. If we are not chosen to supply products to Tiers 1s, OEMs may be less inclined to select our products for a particular vehicle model, which could turn into a lost opportunity to supply our products to this automotive OEM for a period of several years. If our products are not selected by an automotive OEM or its suppliers for one vehicle model or if our products are not successful in that vehicle model, it is less likely that our products will be deployed in other vehicle models of that OEM. If we fail to win a significant number of vehicle models from one or more of automotive OEMs or their suppliers, our business, results of operations and financial condition may be adversely affected.

Our products also are used in a wide variety of existing and emerging use cases in the robotics market, in which our customers are generally engaged in the design, production, operation, or after-market modification of small mobile unmanned vehicles, which includes wheeled robots, legged robots, and drones. This is a competitive market that often has

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strict functional and pricing requirements for products. If we are unable to make products that meet these requirements, or sell products at the required price point, we could lose this business to competitors or competitive technologies. There are diverse and potentially conflicting requirements across the robotics industry that may force us to prioritize certain segments over others, resulting in a lower total available market. Our target markets involve risks of program delay, loss, and cancellation.

The complexity of our products could result in unforeseen delays or expenses from undetected defects, errors or reliability issues in hardware or software which could reduce the market adoption of our new products, damage our reputation with current or prospective customers, expose us to product liability and other claims and adversely affect our operating costs.

Our products are highly technical and very complex and require high standards to manufacture and have in the past and will likely in the future experience defects, errors or reliability issues at various stages of development. We may be unable to timely release new products, manufacture existing products, correct problems that have arisen or correct such problems to our customers’ satisfaction. Additionally, undetected errors, defects or reliability issues, especially as new products are introduced or as new versions are released, could result in serious injury to the end users of technology incorporating our products, or those in the surrounding area, our customers never being able to commercialize technology incorporating our products, litigation against us, negative publicity and other consequences. These risks are particularly prevalent in the autonomous driving and ADAS markets. Some errors or defects in our products may only be discovered after they have been tested, commercialized and deployed by customers. If that is the case, we may incur significant additional development costs and product recall expenses, repair and/or replacement costs. These problems may also result in claims, including class actions, against us by our customers or others. Our reputation or brand may be damaged as a result of these problems and customers may be reluctant to buy our products, which could adversely affect our ability to retain existing customers and attract new customers and could adversely affect our financial results.

In addition, we could face material legal claims for breach of contract, product liability, fraud, tort or breach of warranty as a result of these problems. Defending a lawsuit, regardless of its merit, could be costly and may divert management’s attention and adversely affect the market’s perception of us and our products. In addition, our business liability insurance coverage could prove inadequate with respect to a claim and future coverage may be unavailable on acceptable terms or at all. These product-related issues could result in claims against us and our business could be adversely affected.

Our customers use our solutions in autonomous driving and ADAS applications, which present the risk of significant injury, including fatalities. We may be subject to claims if a product using our lidar technology is involved in an accident and persons are injured or purport to be injured. Any insurance that we carry may not be sufficient or it may not apply to all situations. Similarly, our customers could be subjected to claims as a result of such accidents and bring legal claims against us to attempt to hold us liable. In addition, if lawmakers or governmental agencies were to determine that the use of our products or autonomous driving or certain ADAS applications increased the risk of injury to all or a subset of our customers, they may pass laws or adopt regulations that limit the use of our products or increase our liability associated with the use of our products or that regulate the use of or delay the deployment of autonomous driving and ADAS technology. Any of these events could adversely affect our brand, relationships with customers, operating results or financial condition.

We may incur significant direct or indirect liabilities in connection with our product warranties which could adversely affect our business and operating results.

We typically offer a limited product warranty that requires our products to conform to the applicable specifications and be free from defects in materials and workmanship for one to two years. As a result of increased competition and changing standards in our target markets, we may be required to increase our warranty period length and the scope of our warranty. To be competitive, we may be required to implement these increases before we are able to determine the economic impact of an increase. Accordingly, we may be at risk that any such warranty increase could result in foreseeable and unforeseeable losses for the Company.

In particular, the usage of our products by target customers could make us liable for warranty claims and pecuniary and reputational damages. In our target markets, our products may be placed in physical locations and environments that present harsh operating conditions, or that present a risk of product damage due to accidents or vandalism. This may result in more product failures than we anticipate, and may require us to provide warranties for our products beyond our knowledge of their performance. This could increase the rate of customer returns and warranty claims, resulting in higher-than-expected operating costs for us. Product failures may also affect market acceptance of our products and our ability to win future business. Any negative publicity related to the perceived quality of our products could affect our brand image, partner and customer demand, and adversely affect our operating results and financial condition.

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We may require additional capital in order to execute our business plan, which may not be available on terms acceptable to us, or at all.

We may require additional capital in order to execute on our business plan, and we may require additional capital to fund our R&D efforts and to respond to technological advancements, competitive dynamics or technologies, customer demands, business opportunities, challenges, acquisitions or unforeseen circumstances and we may determine to utilize our “at-the-market” offering program or engage in equity or debt financings or enter into credit facilities for other reasons. In order to stay on our growth trajectory and further business relationships with current or potential customers or partners, or for other reasons, we may issue equity or equity-linked securities to such current or potential customers or partners. We may not be able to timely secure additional debt or equity financing on favorable terms, or at all, particularly in an uncertain economic environment. We maintain the majority of its cash and cash equivalents in accounts with major U.S. and multi-national financial institutions, and our deposits at these institutions exceed insured limits. Market conditions can impact the viability of these institutions. In the event of failure of any of the financial institutions where we maintain our cash and cash equivalents, there can be no assurance that we would be able to access uninsured funds in a timely manner or at all. Any inability to access or delay in accessing these funds could adversely affect our business and financial position.

If we raise additional funds through the issuance of equity or convertible debt, including through our “at-the-market” offering program, or other equity-linked securities or if we issue equity or equity-linked securities to current or potential customers to further business relationships, our existing stockholders could experience significant dilution. Any debt financing obtained by us in the future could involve restrictive covenants relating to our capital raising activities and other financial and operational matters, which may make it more difficult for us to obtain additional capital and to pursue business opportunities, including potential acquisitions. If we are unable to obtain adequate financing or financing on terms satisfactory to us, when we require it, our ability to continue to grow or support our business and to respond to business challenges could be significantly limited and our business results and operations could be materially and adversely affected.

We face risks related to our indebtedness.

As of December 31, 2023, we had total outstanding debt of $44.0 million under our credit agreement with UBS Bank USA and UBS Financial Services Inc. We may incur additional indebtedness in the future. This credit agreement contains various covenants and other restrictions as described in Note 6, Debt included in the notes to consolidated financial statements included elsewhere in this Form 10-K. Our leverage could have important consequences to us, including:

•exposing us to the risk of increased interest rates as our borrowings under our current debt facilities are at variable rates;

•making it more difficult for us to make payments on our debt;

•limiting our ability to pay future dividends;

•increasing our vulnerability to downturns in our business, the storage and organization retail industry or the general economy and limiting our flexibility in planning for, or reacting to, changes in our business;

•requiring a substantial portion of cash flow from operations to be dedicated to the payment of principal and interest on our debt, thereby reducing our ability to use our cash flow to fund our operations, capital expenditures, and future business opportunities;

•restricting us from making strategic acquisitions or causing us to make non-strategic divestitures;

•requiring us to comply with financial and operational covenants including leverage covenants, restricting us, among other things, from placing liens on our assets, making investments, incurring debt, making payments to our equity or debt holders and engaging in transactions with affiliates;

•limiting our ability to obtain additional financing for working capital, capital expenditures, product development, debt service requirements, acquisitions, and general corporate or other purposes;

•preventing us from taking advantage of business opportunities as they arise or successfully carrying out our plans to expand our store base and product offerings; and

•placing us at a competitive disadvantage compared to our competitors who may be less leveraged.

Consequences of this indebtedness may require a substantial portion of cash flow from operations to be dedicated to the payment of principal and interest on our debt, thereby reducing our ability to use our cash flow to fund operations, capital expenditures, and future business opportunities. If we cannot generate sufficient cash flow from operations to service our debt, we may need to refinance our debt, dispose of assets or issue equity to obtain necessary funds. We do not know whether we would be able to take any of these actions on a timely basis, on terms satisfactory to us, or at all. A failure by us or our subsidiaries to comply with the agreements governing our indebtedness could result in an event of default under such indebtedness, which could adversely affect our ability to respond to changes in our business and manage our operations. Upon the occurrence of an event of default under any of the agreements governing our indebtedness, the lenders could elect to declare all amounts outstanding to be due and payable and exercise other remedies as set forth in the

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agreements. If any of our indebtedness were to be accelerated, there can be no assurance that our assets would be sufficient to repay this indebtedness in full, which could have a material adverse effect on our ability to continue to operate as a going concern.

Market adoption of lidar remains uncertain, and it is difficult to forecast long-term end-customer adoption rates and demand for our products.

Substantially all of our revenue is generated by the sale of our digital lidar sensors. Given the evolving nature of the markets in which we operate, it is difficult to predict the customer demand or adoption rates for lidar technology generally or our products specifically. If demand does not develop or if we cannot accurately forecast customer demand, our future financial results, business, results of operations and financial condition will be adversely affected. If current or prospective customers have a negative perception of, or experience with, lidar or a competitor’s lidar products they may be reluctant to adopt lidar in general or specifically our products. Any negative publicity, regardless of its accuracy, could materially and adversely affect our business.

Additionally, existing or new non-lidar technologies may emerge as customers’ preferred alternative to lidar and may adversely affect the adoption of our lidar solutions and of lidar generally. Significant developments in alternative technologies, such as cameras and radar, may materially and adversely affect our business, prospects, financial condition and operating results in ways we do not currently anticipate. Any failure by us or the lidar market generally to develop new or enhanced technologies or processes, or to react to changes in existing technologies, could adversely affect the adoption of lidar and sales of our current products or materially delay the development and introduction of new and enhanced products, which could result in the loss of competitiveness of our products, decreased revenue and a loss of market share to competitors.

We are pursuing opportunities in markets that involve novel applications that are rapidly evolving, and that include both technological and regulatory uncertainties, making it difficult to predict the size and timing of market opportunities. For example, autonomous driving and lidar-based ADAS applications require complex technology, stringent testing, and rigorous safety controls. Because these automotive systems are both themselves complex, and also depend on complex technologies from many suppliers, commercialization of autonomous driving or ADAS products could be delayed or impaired on account of technological capabilities that are not sufficiently advanced for deployment in vehicles. These standards may never be met at all. Additionally, ADAS has yet to, and may never, achieve widespread adoption, which would reduce demand for lidar in that market. Similar concerns are also applicable to our other three verticals.

Although we currently have contracts with numerous commercial customers across diverse markets, these customers may not be able to utilize our technology in the foreseeable future, or at all. Regulatory, safety or reliability developments, many of which are outside of our control, could also cause delays or otherwise impair commercial adoption of these new technologies, which will adversely affect our growth. Our future financial performance will depend on our ability to make timely investments in the correct market opportunities in this environment.

Many of our customers are still in the testing and development phases of applications with our products and it cannot be certain that they will commercialize products or systems with our digital lidar sensors or at all. We believe adoption of lidar products, including our digital lidar sensors, will depend on numerous factors, including: whether the technological capabilities of lidar and lidar-based products meet users’ current and evolving needs; whether the benefits of designing lidar into larger sensing systems outweigh the costs, complexity and time needed to deploy such technology or replace or modify existing systems that may have used other modalities such as cameras and radars; whether users in other applications can move beyond the testing and development phases and proceed to commercializing systems supported by lidar technology and whether lidar developers can keep pace with rapid technological changes in certain developing markets. If lidar technology generally does not achieve commercial success or if the market adoption is slower than expected, our business, results of operation and financial condition will be materially and adversely affected.

We may experience difficulties in managing our growth and expanding our operations.

We are experiencing significant growth in the scope and nature of our operations. Our ability to manage our operations and future growth will require us to continue to improve our operational, financial and management controls, compliance programs and reporting systems. We are currently in the process of strengthening our compliance programs, including our compliance programs related to product certifications, quality management systems certifications, environmental certifications, export controls, privacy and cybersecurity and anti-corruption. We may not be able to implement improvements in an efficient or timely manner and may discover deficiencies in existing controls, programs, systems and procedures, which could have an adverse effect on our business, reputation and financial results. Additionally, rapid growth in our business may place a strain on our human and capital resources. Furthermore, we expect to continue to conduct our business internationally and anticipate increased business operations in the United States, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. These diversified, global operations place increased demands on our limited resources and require us to substantially

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expand the capabilities of our administrative and operational resources and to attract, train, manage and retain qualified management, technical, manufacturing, engineering, sales and other personnel. As our operations expand domestically and internationally, we will need to continue to manage multiple locations and additional relationships with various customers, partners, suppliers and other third parties across several markets.

We are focusing our current commercial efforts across four distinct target markets. We will be required to prioritize our limited financial and managerial resources as we pursue particular development and commercialization efforts in each target market. Any resources we expend on one or more of these efforts could be at the expense of other potentially profitable opportunities.

If we are not able to effectively maintain or grow our global sales and marketing organization, or maintain or grow an effective network of distributors, resellers, and integrators, our business prospects, results of operations and financial condition could be adversely affected.

In order to generate future sales growth, we will need to maintain or grow the size and geographic coverage of our field organization, including marketing, direct sales, customer support and technical services. Accordingly, our future success will depend largely on our ability to hire, train, retain, and motivate skilled regional sales managers and direct sales representatives with significant technical knowledge and understanding of our products. Because of the competition for their skillset, we may not be able to attract or retain such personnel on reasonable terms, if at all. If we are unable to maintain or grow our global sales and marketing organizations, we may not be able to increase our revenue, which would adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.

Additionally, we rely on a network of independent distributors to help generate sales of our products internationally. If a dispute arises with a distributor or if we terminate our relationship with a distributor or a distributor goes out of business, it may take time to identify an alternative distributor, to train new personnel to market our products, and our ability to sell our products in a region formerly serviced by a terminated distributor could be harmed. In addition, our distributors may not successfully market and sell our products and may not devote sufficient time and resources that we believe are necessary to enable our products to develop, achieve or sustain market acceptance. Any of these factors could reduce our revenue or impair our revenue growth in affected markets, increase our costs in those markets or damage our reputation. In addition, if an independent distributor were to depart and be retained by one of our competitors, we may be unable to prevent that distributor from soliciting business from our existing customers, which could further adversely affect us. As a result of our reliance on third-party distributors, we may be subject to disruptions and increased costs due to factors beyond our control, including labor strikes, third-party errors and other issues. If the services of any of these third-party distributors become unsatisfactory, we may experience delays in meeting our customers’ demands and we may be unable to find a suitable replacement on a timely basis or on commercially reasonable terms. Any failure to deliver products in a timely manner may damage our reputation and could cause us to lose potential customers.

Our forecasts of market growth may not be accurate.

Market opportunity estimates and growth forecasts included in this Annual Report on Form 10-K and in our other public disclosures are subject to significant uncertainty and are based on assumptions and estimates that may not prove to be accurate. The forecasts and estimates relating to the expected size and growth of the markets for lidar-based technology may prove to be inaccurate. Even if these markets experience the forecasted growth, we may not grow our business at similar rates, or at all. Our future growth is subject to many factors, including market adoption of our products, which is subject to many risks and uncertainties. Accordingly, the forecasts and estimates of market size and growth described in this Annual Report on Form 10-K and in our other public disclosures, should not be taken as indicative of our future growth.

Our sales and operations in international markets expose us to operational, financial and regulatory risks.

International sales comprise a significant amount of our overall revenue and while growing our international sales is an important part of our growth strategy, these efforts may not be successful. International operations are subject to a number of other risks, including:

•import and export laws and the impact of tariffs;

•exchange rate fluctuations;

•political and economic instability, war, international terrorism and anti-American sentiment, particularly in emerging markets and the geographic regions affected by the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas wars;

•potential for violations of anti-corruption laws and regulations, such as those related to bribery and fraud;

•preference for locally branded products, and laws and business practices favoring local competition;

•increased difficulty in managing inventory;

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•increased risk in collecting trade receivables;

•delayed revenue recognition;

•less effective protection and/or lack of enforceability of intellectual property;

•stringent regulation of the autonomous or other systems or products using our products and stringent consumer protection and product compliance regulations, including but not limited to General Data Protection Regulation in the European Union, European competition law, the Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive, the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive and the European Ecodesign Directive that are costly to comply with and may vary from country to country;

•difficulties and costs of staffing and managing foreign operations;

•changes in local tax and customs duty laws or changes in the enforcement, application or interpretation of such laws; and

•U.S. government’s restrictions on certain technology transfer to certain countries of concern.

The occurrence of any of these risks could negatively affect our international business and consequently our business, operating results, and financial condition.

We are subject to the risk of cancellation or postponement of our contracts with customers or the unsuccessful implementation of our products, which may adversely affect our business, results of operations and financial condition.

We have experienced, and may experience in the future, unexpected cancellations of major purchases of our products, which has affected and may adversely affect our results of operations. Prospective customers across our target markets generally must make significant commitments of resources to test and validate our products and confirm that they can be integrated with other technologies before including them in any particular system, product or model. Our products must meet customer specifications for quality, reliability and performance. Integration of our products may reveal errors, defects or incompatibilities with other sensing modalities that, if we are unable to correct them, may result in loss of customers, loss of market share, damage to our brand and reputation, increased service and replacement costs, lack of profitability, and constitute a hindrance to market acceptance. Although our agreements may contain provisions that aim at limiting our liability for damages resulting from defects in our products, such limitations and disclaimers may not be enforceable or otherwise effectively protect us from such claims, and we may have to indemnify our customers against liabilities arising from defects in our products or in their solutions that incorporate our products. These liabilities may also include costs incurred by our channel partners or end users to correct problems or replace our products, which could adversely affect our operating results and business prospects. These inherent operational risks are all the more important that the development cycles of our products with new customers vary widely depending on the application, market, customer and the complexity of the product. In our four target markets, development cycles can be six months to seven or more years. These development cycles require us to invest significant resources prior to realizing any revenue from the commercialization. Our revenue growth may be impaired if the system, product or vehicle model that includes our digital lidar sensors is unsuccessful, including for reasons unrelated to our technology or software. Long development cycles and product cancellations or postponements may adversely affect our business, results of operations and financial condition.

If we do not adequately manage our inventory, we could lose sales or incur higher inventory-related expenses, which could negatively affect our operating results.

To ensure adequate inventory supply, we forecast inventory needs and expenses, place orders sufficiently in advance with our suppliers and manufacturing partners and manufacture products based on our estimates of future demand for particular products. Fluctuations in the adoption of lidar products may affect our ability to forecast our future operating results, including revenue, gross margins, cash flows and profitability. Our ability to accurately forecast demand for our products could be affected by many factors, including the rapidly changing nature of our current target markets, the uncertainty surrounding the market acceptance and commercialization of lidar technology, the emergence of new markets, an increase or decrease in customer demand for our products or for products and services of our competitors, product introductions by competitors, the COVID-19 pandemic, other epidemics and public health crises, and any associated work stoppages or interruptions, unanticipated changes in general market conditions and the weakening of economic conditions or consumer confidence in future economic conditions. We may face challenges acquiring adequate supplies to manufacture our products and we, Benchmark and Fabrinet may not be able to manufacture our sensors at a rate necessary to satisfy the levels of demand, which would negatively affect our short-term and long-term growth. This risk may be exacerbated by the fact that we may not carry or be able to obtain from our suppliers a significant amount of inventory to satisfy short-term demand increases. If we fail to accurately forecast customer demand, we may experience excess inventory levels or a shortage of products available for sale, which has forced us to record inventory write-downs in the past

Inventory levels in excess of customer demand have resulted and may in the future result in inventory write-downs or write-offs and the sale of excess inventory at discounted prices, which would adversely affect our financial results,

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including our gross margin, and have a negative effect on our brand. Conversely, if we underestimate customer demand for our products, we may not be able to deliver products to meet our requirements, and this could result in damage to our brand and customer relationships and adversely affect our revenue and operating results.

We are exposed to the risk of write-downs on the value of our inventory and other assets, in addition to purchase commitment cancellation risk.

We record a write-down for product and component inventories that have become obsolete or exceed anticipated demand, or for which cost exceeds net realizable value. We also accrue necessary cancellation fee reserves for orders of excess products and components. We review long-lived assets, including capital assets held at our suppliers’ facilities, for impairment whenever events or circumstances indicate the assets may not be recoverable. If we determine that an impairment has occurred, we record a write-down equal to the amount by which the carrying value of the asset exceeds its fair value. No assurance can be given that we will not incur write-downs, fees, impairments and other charges given the rapid and unpredictable pace of product obsolescence in the industries in which we compete.

We order components for our products and build inventory in advance of product manufacturing and shipments. Manufacturing purchase obligations cover our forecasted component and manufacturing requirements, typically for periods up to three months. Because our target markets are volatile, competitive and subject to rapid technology and price changes, and because we have limited sales history, there is a risk we will forecast incorrectly and order or produce excess or insufficient amounts of components or products, or not fully utilize our firm purchase commitments.

Our business could be materially and adversely affected if our customers become unable to, or otherwise do not, pay their invoices.

If one or more of our major customers is unable to pay our invoices as they become due or a customer simply refuses to make such payments if it experiences financial difficulties, our business would be adversely affected. If a major customer were to enter into bankruptcy proceedings or similar proceedings whereby contractual commitments are subject to stay of execution and the possibility of legal or other modification, we could be forced to record a substantial loss. Additionally, a number of our customers are startup companies, small and mid-sized businesses, that are privately funded, have limited resources, and do not have a history of creditworthiness that we can audit to determine reliability and increase the potential risk to record potential losses. These companies could fail to raise enough capital and have to shut down operations. Even if they are financially solvent and stable and we are successful in securing a commercial relationship with them, their business plans for future programs may be inherently uncertain and unpredictable, and less structured than established companies.

We are exposed to credit risk on our trade accounts receivable, supplier non-trade receivables and prepayments related to long-term supply agreements, and this risk is heightened during periods when economic conditions worsen.

We sell our products directly to small and mid-sized businesses and educational customers. Our outstanding trade receivables are not covered by collateral, third-party bank support or financing arrangements, or credit insurance. Our exposure to credit and collectability risk on our trade receivables is higher in certain international markets and our ability to mitigate such risks may be limited. We also have unsecured supplier non-trade receivables resulting from purchases of components by outsourcing partners and other vendors that manufacture sub-assemblies or assemble final products for us. In addition, from time to time, we may make prepayments associated with long-term supply agreements to secure supply of inventory components. While we are implementing procedures to monitor and limit exposure to credit risk on our trade and supplier non-trade receivables, there can be no assurance such procedures will effectively limit our credit risk and avoid losses.

Our ability to use our net operating loss carryforwards and certain other tax attributes may be limited.

It is possible that we will not generate taxable income in time to use our net operating loss carryforwards and certain tax credits before their expiration (if we generate taxable income at all).

In addition, our federal and state net operating loss carryforwards and certain tax credits may be subject to significant limitations under Section 382 and Section 383 of the Internal Revenue Code, respectively, and similar provisions of state law. Under those sections of the Internal Revenue Code, if a corporation undergoes an “ownership change,” the corporation’s ability to use its pre-change net operating loss carryforwards and other pre-change tax attributes, such as research tax credits, to offset its post-change income or taxes may be limited. In general, an “ownership change” will occur if there is a cumulative change in our ownership by certain significant shareholders that exceeds 50 percentage points over a rolling three-year period. Similar rules may apply under state tax laws. We have completed an analysis of Section 382 ownership changes in our stock through February 10, 2023 and have concluded that we have experienced ownership changes that will result in limitations in our ability to use an immaterial amount of tax credit carryforwards. We may experience ownership changes in the future as a result of future transactions in our stock. If it is determined that we

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undergo one or more ownership changes in the future, then our ability to utilize our federal and state net operating loss carryforwards or other tax attributes may be limited or eliminated.

Key components in our products come from limited or single source third-party suppliers, and we expect to rely on third parties to manufacture a significant portion of our products for the foreseeable future. Interruptions in our relationships with these third parties could adversely impact our business.

We rely on third-party manufacturers, including Benchmark and Fabrinet, to supply our products. These arrangements are intended to lower our operating costs, but they also reduce our direct control over production and distribution. This diminished control may have an adverse effect on the quality or quantity of products or services, or our flexibility to respond to changing conditions. If Benchmark or any of our third-party component suppliers or logistics and transportation partners experience interruptions, delays or disruptions in supplying their products or services, including by natural disasters, trade restrictions, the global COVID-19 pandemic, other epidemics and public health crises, or work stoppages or capacity constraints, our ability to ship products to distributors and customers may be delayed. In addition, unfavorable economic conditions could result in financial distress among third-party suppliers or manufacturers upon which we rely, thereby increasing the risk of disruption of supplies necessary to fulfill our production requirements and meet customer demands. Additionally, if any of these third parties on whom we rely were to experience quality control problems in their operations and our products do not meet customer or regulatory requirements, we could be required to cover the cost of repair or replacement of any defective products. These delays or product quality issues could have an immediate and material adverse effect on our ability to fulfill orders and could have a negative effect on our operating results. In addition, such delays or issues with product quality could adversely affect our reputation and our relationship with our customers, distributors, value added software resellers, and integrators.

If these third parties experience financial, operational, manufacturing capacity or other difficulties, or experience shortages in required components, or if they are otherwise unable or unwilling to continue to manufacture our products in required volumes or at all, our supply may be disrupted, we may be required to seek alternate manufacturers and we may be required to re-design our products. It would be time-consuming, and could be costly and impracticable, to begin to use new manufacturers, components or designs, and such changes could cause significant interruptions in supply and could have an adverse effect on our ability to meet our scheduled product deliveries and may subsequently lead to the loss of sales. While we take measures to protect our trade secrets, the use of third-party suppliers and manufacturers may also risk disclosure of our innovative and proprietary manufacturing methodologies, which could adversely affect our business.

We believe there are a limited number of competent, high-quality suppliers in the industry that meet our strict quality and control standards, and as we seek to obtain additional or alternative supplier arrangements in the future, there can be no assurance that we would be able to do so on satisfactory terms, in a timely manner, or at all. Our suppliers could also discontinue or modify components used in our products. In some cases, the lead times associated with certain components are lengthy and preclude rapid changes in quantities and delivery schedules. We may in the future experience component shortages and price fluctuations of certain key components and materials, and the predictability of the availability and pricing of these components may be limited. Component shortages or pricing fluctuations could be material in the future. In the event of a component shortage, supply interruption or material pricing change from suppliers of these components, we may not be able to develop alternate sources in a timely manner or at all in the case of sole or limited sources. Developing alternate sources of supply for these components may be time-consuming, difficult, and costly and we may not be able to source these components on terms that are acceptable to us, or at all, which may undermine our ability to meet our requirements or to fill customer orders in a timely manner. Any interruption or delay in the supply of any of these parts or components, or the inability to obtain these parts or components from alternate sources at acceptable prices and within a reasonable amount of time, would adversely affect our ability to meet our scheduled product deliveries to our customers. This could adversely affect our relationships with customers and distributors and could cause delays in shipment of our products and adversely affect our operating results. In addition, increased component costs could result in lower gross margins. Even where we are able to pass increased component costs along to our customers, there may be a lapse of time before it is possible to do so, such that we must absorb the increased cost. If we are unable to buy these components in quantities sufficient to meet our requirements on a timely basis, we will not be able to deliver our products to our customers, and cause our customers to use competitors’ products instead of ours.

Should operations at our third-party suppliers, including Benchmark and Fabrinet, encounter disruptions or losses that may be caused by work stoppages, disease outbreaks or pandemics, acts of war, terrorism, fire, earthquakes, flooding or other natural disasters, it could result in delays, postponement or reduce production of our products, which could have a material adverse effect on our business, results of operations and financial condition until such time as such production disruption is resolved or an alternate source of production or supply is secured.

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Outsourcing a substantial percentage of our manufacturing outside of the United States involves certain risks or may not be successful, which could harm our ability to deliver products and recognize revenue.

Historically, we manufactured all of our digital sensors at our facility in San Francisco, California. We intend to maintain a portion of our manufacturing at this facility; however, in 2019, we began moving a portion of our manufacturing operations to a manufacturing facility in Thailand in connection with our relationship with Benchmark, which for the year ended December 31, 2023, accounted for the majority of our OS sensor manufacturing output. In 2023, after the merger with Velodyne, we began moving manufacturing operations of Velodyne sensors to a Fabrinet facility in Thailand. Any substantial delay in bringing this facility up to full production on our current schedule may hinder our ability to produce all of the products needed to meet orders and/or achieve our expected financial performance. Opening this facility has required, and will continue to require, additional capital expenditures and the efforts and attention of our management and other personnel, which has and will continue to divert resources from our existing business or operations. If and when this manufacturing facility is brought up to full production according to our current schedule, it may not provide us with all of the operational and financial benefits we expect to receive.

We have invested in manufacturing process equipment which is held at these Thailand facilities, and we may make prepayments to some of our suppliers associated with long-term supply agreements. While these arrangements help ensure the supply of components and finished goods, if our co-manufacturer or suppliers experience severe financial problems or other disruptions in their business, such continued supply would be reduced or terminated, and the recoverability of manufacturing process equipment or prepayments would be negatively impacted.

Additionally, manufacturing outside the United States is subject to several inherent risks, including:

•foreign currency fluctuations;

•local economic conditions;

•political instability;

•import or export requirements;

•foreign government regulatory requirements;

•reduced protection for intellectual property rights in some countries;

•tariffs and other trade barriers and restrictions; and

•potentially adverse tax consequences.

We do not currently have long-term, committed supply contracts with many of our suppliers. Loss of one or more of these suppliers or our inability to identify and establish relationships with new suppliers could harm our business and impede our growth.

Because we do not maintain long-term supply contracts, any of our suppliers could seek to alter or terminate its relationship with us at any time, leaving us with periods during which we have limited or no ability to manufacture our products. The production of our products is dependent on producing or sourcing certain key components, including semiconductor chips, and raw materials at acceptable price levels. If we are unable to adequately reduce and control the costs of such key components, we will be unable to realize manufacturing costs targets, which could reduce the market adoption of our products, damage our reputation with current or prospective customers, and materially and adversely impact our brand, business, prospects, financial condition and operating results.

Adverse conditions in the industries we target or the global economy more generally could have adverse effects on our results of operations.

While we make our strategic planning decisions based on the assumption that the markets we are targeting will grow, our business is dependent, in large part on, and directly affected by, business cycles and other factors affecting the robotics, industrial automation, smart infrastructure, and transportation industries and global economy generally. Our target markets are highly cyclical and depend on general economic conditions and other factors, including consumer spending and preferences, changes in interest rates and credit availability, consumer confidence, inflation, environmental impact, governmental incentives and regulatory requirements, political volatility, labor relations issues, trade agreements and other factors.

For example, general inflation in the United States, Europe and other geographies has risen to levels not experienced in recent decades. General inflation, including rising prices for inputs and rising wages, as well as rising interest rates negatively impact our business by increasing our operating costs. General inflation also negatively impacts our business by decreasing the capital for our customers to deploy to purchase our products. Inflation may cause our customers to reduce or delay orders for our products thereby causing a decrease in sales. Increased instability relating to this higher inflation as well as rising interest rates may enhance volatility in currency exchange rates, limit our suppliers’ and customers’ access to

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credit and limit our ability to access debt and equity financing. These uncertainties may make it difficult for us and our suppliers and customers to accurately plan future business activities and materially adversely impact our operating results and financial condition.

Our future success depends in part on recruiting and retaining key personnel and if we fail to do so, it may be more difficult for us to execute our business strategy. We are currently a small organization and may need to hire additional qualified personnel to effectively implement our strategic plan.

Our success depends on our ability to attract, retain and motivate highly qualified management, technical, manufacturing, engineering and sales personnel. In particular, our success may depend on our ability to recruit and retain management personnel who are qualified to manage a public company. We are highly dependent on our senior management, including our founders, Angus Pacala and Mark Frichtl. If any of such persons left, our business could be harmed. All of our U.S. based employees are “at-will” employees. The loss of the services of one or more of our key employees could delay or have an impact on the successful commercialization of our products. We do not maintain key man insurance.

Our ability to successfully execute on our strategic plan depends in part on our ability to continue to appropriately build our organization and hire qualified personnel, especially with engineering, sales, technical, and manufacturing expertise. Competition for qualified personnel is especially severe in the San Francisco Bay Area. We may not be able to attract and retain qualified personnel on acceptable terms given the competition for such personnel. If we are unsuccessful in our recruitment and retention efforts, it may adversely affect our business and our growth prospects.

In addition, in connection with the closing of the Velodyne Merger, in February 2023, we implemented a reduction in force to reduce redundancies with the acquired business. While positions have been eliminated, certain functions necessary to our operations remain, and we have distributed the duties and obligations of departed employees among our remaining employees. The reduction in workforce could make it difficult for us to pursue, or prevent us from pursuing, new opportunities and initiatives due to insufficient personnel, or require us to incur additional and unanticipated costs to hire new personnel to pursue such opportunities or initiatives. If we are unable to realize the anticipated benefits from the reduction in force, or if we experience significant adverse consequences from the reduction in force, our business, financial condition, and results of operations may be materially adversely affected.

Some of our employees are employed by professional employer organizations which may have unexpected costs that could adversely impact our business.

We contract with non-US professional employer organizations (“PEOs”), to administer our human resources, payroll and employee benefits functions for some of our subsidiaries’ employees outside of the United States. Although we recruit and select these employees, their employment relationship is with the relevant PEO. Accordingly, these employees are compensated through the PEO, are governed by the work policies created by the PEO and receive their annual wage statements and other payroll-related reports from the PEO. In addition, some of these employees may receive stock compensation directly from the Company. The PEO relationship streamlines hiring and employee maintenance, and enables management to focus on issues other than payroll administration, but this relationship also exposes us to some risks. For example, if the PEO is unable to or otherwise fails to adequately withhold or pay employer taxes or to comply with other applicable laws, we may be held liable for such violations notwithstanding any indemnification provisions provided to us by the PEOs. In certain non-US jurisdictions, despite the PEO relationship, there is a risk that the employee may nonetheless be deemed our direct employee and that the Company may be deemed to have a permanent operation in a non-US jurisdiction. Court and administrative proceedings related to matters of employment tax, labor law and other laws applicable to PEO arrangements could distract management from our business and cause us to incur significant expense. If we were held liable for violations by PEOs, such monetary penalties may adversely affect our profitability and could negatively affect our business and results of operations.

We may be unable to successfully integrate our business with Velodyne or realize the expected benefits of the Velodyne Merger on our expected timeframe or at all. In addition, if we choose to acquire or invest in other new businesses, products or technologies, we may be unable to complete these acquisitions or to successfully integrate them in a cost-effective and/or non-disruptive manner.

Our success depends on our ability to enhance and broaden our product offerings in response to changing customer demands, competitive pressures and advances in technologies. Failure to successfully identify, complete, manage and integrate acquisitions could materially and adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations and could cause our stock price to decline. We continue to search for viable acquisition candidates or strategic transactions that would expand our market sector and/or global presence, as well as additional products appropriate for current distribution channels. Accordingly, we have previously and may in the future pursue the acquisition of new businesses, products or technologies instead of developing them internally. Our future success will depend, in part, upon our ability to manage the expanded business following these acquisitions, including challenges related to the management and monitoring of new

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operations and associated increased costs and complexity associated with such acquisitions. For example, in February 2023, we completed the Velodyne Merger to help us enhance our robust suite of product offerings and software; grow our diverse customer base; increase operational efficiencies; further develop our innovative product roadmap in anticipation for the future needs of the market; reduce our production costs; improve our path to profitability; and strengthen our future financial position. In connection with any acquisitions, we could issue additional equity securities, which would dilute our stockholders, incur substantial debt to fund the acquisitions or assume significant liabilities.

Acquisitions involve many and diverse risks and uncertainties, including risks associated with conduction due diligence, problems integrating the purchased operations, assets, technologies or products, unanticipated costs, liabilities, and economic, political, legal and regulatory challenges due to our inexperience operating in new regions or countries, inability to achieve anticipated synergies, overpaying for acquisitions, invalid sales assumptions underlying potential acquisitions, issues maintaining uniform standards, procedures, controls and policies, diversion of management attention, adverse effects on existing business relationships or acquired company business relationships, risks associated with entering new markets, potential loss of key employees of acquired businesses, increased legal, accounting and compliance costs,and failure to successfully integrate acquired companies, such as Sense or Velodyne, or retain key personnel from the acquired company. Acquisitions may divert our attention from our core business. Acquisitions may require us to record goodwill and non-amortizable intangible assets that will be subject to testing on a regular basis and potential period impairment charges, incur amortization expenses related to certain intangible assets, and incur write offs and restructuring and other related expenses, any of which could harm our operating results and financial condition.

We compete with other companies for these opportunities, and we may be unable to consummate such acquisitions or other strategic transactions on commercially reasonable terms, or at all. In addition, acquired businesses may have ongoing or potential liabilities, legal claims (including tort and/or personal injury claims) or adverse operating issues that we fail to discover through due diligence prior to the acquisition. Even if we are aware of such liabilities, claims or issues, we may not be able to accurately estimate the magnitude of the related liabilities and damages. In particular, to the extent that prior owners of any acquired businesses or properties failed to comply with or otherwise violated applicable laws or regulations, failed to fulfill their contractual obligations to their customers, or failed to satisfy legal obligations to employees or third parties, we, as the successor, may be financially responsible for these violations and failures and may suffer reputational harm or otherwise be adversely affected. Acquisitions also frequently result in the recording of goodwill and other intangible assets which are subject to potential impairment in the future that could harm our financial results. If we were to issue additional equity in connection with such acquisitions, this may dilute our stockholders.

Legal and Regulatory Risks Related to Our Business

Our products are frequently used in applications that are subject to evolving regulations and standards.

Our customers may use our products for regulated and standardized applications that require our products to comply with regulations and standards that are applicable to both our products and to those industries and applications, including functional safety and product reliability standards. New regulations and industry standards may be adopted that result in delays or cancellations of programs. If we decide not to pursue or fail to achieve these regulatory or industry certifications, we may lose existing or potential commercial opportunities or be exposed to legal liability from regulators.

We are subject to governmental export and import controls and economic sanctions laws and regulations. Our failure to comply with these laws and regulations could have an adverse effect on our business, prospects, financial condition and results of operations.

Our products and solutions are subject to certain U.S. and foreign export controls, trade sanctions, and import laws and regulations, including the U.S. Export Administration Regulations, U.S. Customs regulations and various economic and trade sanctions regulations administered by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Controls. U.S. export control laws and regulations and economic sanctions prohibit the shipment of certain products and services to countries, governments, and persons targeted by U.S. sanctions. Even though we take precautions to prevent our productions and solutions from being provided to entities subject to these restrictions, our products could find their way to such prohibited entities. Any such provision could have negative consequences, including government investigations, penalties, or reputational harm.

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In addition, complying with export control and sanctions regulations for a particular sale may be time-consuming and create delays in the introduction of our products and solutions in some international markets, and, in some cases, prevent the export of our software and services to some countries altogether. Exports of our products and technology must be made in compliance with these laws and regulations. If a license is required from a government agency prior to sale, no exports may occur until the appropriate approvals are obtained. If we fail to comply with these laws and regulations, penalties could be imposed, including substantial monetary fines and/or denial of export privileges. In addition, in extreme cases responsible employees or managers can be held criminally liable for such violations.

Changes to trade policy, tariffs and import/export regulations may have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition and results of operations.

Any new export or import restrictions, new legislation or shifting approaches in the enforcement or scope of existing regulations, or changes in global, political, regulatory and economic conditions affecting U.S. trade, manufacturing, development or investment, could result in additional restrictions on our ability to conduct business. In recent years, the U.S. has instituted or proposed changes in trade policies that include the negotiation or termination of trade agreements, the imposition of higher tariffs on imports into the U.S., economic sanctions on individuals, corporations or countries, and other government regulations affecting trade between the U.S. and other countries where we conduct our business. A number of other nations have proposed or instituted similar measures directed at trade with the United States in response. As a result of these developments, there may be greater restrictions and economic disincentives on international trade that could adversely affect our business. As additional trade-related policies are instituted, we may need to modify our business operations to comply and adapt to such developments, which may be time-consuming and expensive.

Moreover, China and the U.S. have each imposed tariffs, indicating the potential for further trade barriers which may escalate a nascent trade war between China and the U.S. The resulting environment of retaliatory trade or other practices or additional trade restrictions or barriers, if implemented on a broader range of products or raw materials, could harm our ability to obtain necessary materials. For example, tariffs on certain Chinese origin goods impact the cost of material and machines we import directly from our manufacturing operations in China, as well as the cost of material and components imported on our behalf by suppliers. The indirect impact of inflationary pressure on costs throughout the supply chain and the direct impact, for example, on costs for machines we import from our manufacturing operations in China, may result in higher input costs and lower margins on certain products we sell, which could have a material adverse effect on our business, prospects, results of operations and cash flows.

We have been and may in the future become involved in legal and regulatory proceedings and commercial or contractual disputes, which could have a material adverse effect on our profitability and consolidated financial position.

We have been and may in the future be, from time to time, involved in litigation, regulatory proceedings and commercial or contractual disputes and these matters may be significant. These matters may include, without limitation, disputes with our distributors, suppliers and customers, intellectual property claims, stockholder litigation, government investigations, class action lawsuits, personal injury claims, environmental issues, customs and value-added tax disputes and employment and tax issues. In addition, we have in the past and could face in the future a variety of labor and employment claims against us, which could include but is not limited to general discrimination, wage and hour, privacy, ERISA or disability claims. In such matters, government agencies or private parties may seek to recover from us large, indeterminate amounts in penalties or monetary damages (including, in some cases, treble or punitive damages) or seek to limit our operations in some way. These types of lawsuits could require significant management time and attention or could involve substantial legal liability, adverse regulatory outcomes, or substantial expenses to defend. Often these cases raise complex factual and legal issues and create risks and uncertainties.

For descriptions of legal proceedings to which we are party, including proceedings assumed in connection with the Velodyne Merger, see Note 9. Commitments and Contingencies included in the notes to our audited consolidated financial statements included elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

We have in the past and could in the future be forced to expend significant resources in the defense of these lawsuits or future ones, and we may not prevail. No assurances can be given that any proceedings and claims will not have a material adverse impact on our operating results and consolidated financial position or that our available insurance will mitigate this impact.

OUST US Equity

OUST · 10-K · period ended 2023-12-31

Item 1. Business.

Item 1A. Risk Factors

OUST US Equity☆

OUST · 10-K · period ended 2023-12-31

Item 1. Business.

Item 1A. Risk Factors

OUST US Equity