Overview

Gender

male

Austin is an engineer, entrepreneur, and LiDAR industry pioneer for autonomous vehicles. He founded Luminar in 2012 with a mission to make autonomy safe and ubiquitous. After years of ground-up technology development and breakthroughs, he has grown it into now a 400-person operation and partnered with a number of the world’s leading automakers and technology companies, including Toyota and Volvo.


Prior to Luminar, Austin began his career in industry at age 11 by building supercomputers and optical power transmission systems. He applied for his first patent at 13, and three years later became an independent researcher at the Beckman Laser Institute. After a short stint at Stanford in the Applied Physics department, he accepted the Thiel Fellowship at 17 pursue his vision of Luminar and build out the technology. Austin is recognized as a Thiel Fellow, MIT 35 under 35, and industry lead in Forbes 30 under 30.