This brings Cepton's total funding to nearly $100 million, providing a strong foundation to substantially ramp up its R&D efforts, expand its footprint in the automotive market and support major customers worldwide.

The latest funding round was led by Koito Manufacturing Co., Ltd. (TYO:7276), the automotive Tier 1 and world-leading provider of automotive lighting systems, with an investment of $50 million. Existing investors in Cepton also participated in this round. As part of the transaction, Koito will obtain non-exclusive rights to manufacture and sell Cepton's lidar sensor design for an automotive application, using key components supplied by Cepton.

Cepton will use the proceeds to accelerate development and deployment of its advanced lidar technology in ADAS applications, in autonomous vehicle applications, as well as in other fast-growing markets such as smart cities / intelligent transportation systems (ITS) and security.

Cepton's unique and patented Micro Motion Technology (MMT™) is different from traditional beam-steering technologies, such as mechanical rotation, micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) and scanning mirrors. The MMT architecture enables a mirrorless, frictionless and rotation-free lidar solution to increase the reliability and manufacturability of the product, while delivering high performance and low power at affordable price points.

"Since Cepton was founded in 2016, we have made great strides in advancing the state-of-the-art in lidar technology and bringing the benefits of lidar-based solutions to a variety of markets," said Dr. Jun Pei, co-founder and CEO of Cepton. "With this latest investment round, the year 2020 is poised to be truly transformational for Cepton's future, and we are excited to welcome Koito not just as an investor but also as a technology and manufacturing partner. Combining Koito's world leadership in automotive lighting and their world-class quality, reliability and manufacturing with Cepton's award-winning lidar solutions presents a tremendous opportunity to make deep inroads into the automotive market."

About Cepton Technologies, Inc.

Cepton provides state-of-the-art, intelligent, lidar-based solutions for a range of markets such as autonomous driving, ADAS, intelligent traffic systems, security, crowd analytics, and industrial robotics. Cepton's patented MMT™-based lidar technology enables reliable, scalable and cost-effective solutions that deliver long range, high resolution 3D perception for smart applications.

Founded in 2016 and led by industry veterans with over two decades of collective experience across a wide range of advanced lidar and imaging technologies, Cepton is focused on the mass market commercialization of high performance, high quality lidar solutions. Cepton is headquartered in San Jose, California, USA. It also has registered offices in Germany, Canada and UK and a fast growing, global customer base.