Ouster Brand Guidelines: The San Francisco Lidar Maker That Merged With Velodyne

Two Stanford classmates and a cheaper sensor.

Ouster is a lidar company based in San Francisco. English Wikipedia says it was founded in 2015 by Angus Pacala and Mark Frichtl, together with two other former Stanford University classmates, after they had worked at the laser-sensing company Quanergy. TechCrunch told the story in December 2017, when Ouster came out of stealth: Pacala said that Stanford’s win in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, a race for driverless vehicles, was one of the reasons he went there; he met Frichtl in his freshman year, and the two later worked together at Quanergy, which Pacala had co-founded.

That December the company announced its series A round, led by Cox Enterprises, the owner of Cox Automotive. Its first product was the OS1, a 64-channel lidar sensor that Ouster said was lighter and smaller and used less power than its rivals, and which was already shipping. Pacala told TechCrunch that the long-term aim was to move lidar “from being a research product to being in every consumer automobile,” and that design for manufacturing mattered as much as the underlying technology.

Lidar, short for light detection and ranging, measures distance with laser pulses to build a three-dimensional picture of the surroundings. Ouster calls its approach “digital lidar”, and English Wikipedia notes that its sensors also produce images from ambient infrared light.

A SPAC listing, Sense Photonics and Velodyne.

Ouster went public in March 2021 through a merger with Colonnade Acquisition, a special-purpose acquisition company, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange, according to English Wikipedia; TechCrunch confirmed in October 2021 that it had gone public that year through a SPAC. That October Ouster agreed to buy Sense Photonics, a San Francisco developer of solid-state lidar, in an all-stock deal, and said it would set up a new unit, Ouster Automotive, led by Sense’s chief executive, TechCrunch reported.

The larger step came next. In November 2022 Ouster and Velodyne Lidar agreed to merge in an all-share deal that split the combined business evenly between the two sets of shareholders. The merger was completed in February 2023, and the combined company kept the Ouster name, its headquarters in San Francisco and its New York ticker, OUST, Robotics & Automation News reported on 13 February 2023; the two companies described it as a “merger of equals.”

Velodyne brought a long history with it. English Wikipedia says David Hall founded Velodyne in 1983 as an audio company specialising in subwoofers. It turned to laser ranging after Hall and his brother entered the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005, and by the 2007 race it was selling a spinning multi-laser sensor that, the same article says, five of the six finishing teams used. The lidar business was spun off from Velodyne Acoustics as Velodyne Lidar in 2016 and went public in 2020. Its HDL-64E sensor sat on the roof of Google’s early self-driving Prius, the article adds.

At the merger, the combined product line included Ouster’s OS and DF series sensors, Velodyne’s lidar sensors and Ouster’s Gemini and BlueCity software, Robotics & Automation News reported. English Wikipedia records that Ouster was an honoree at the CES Innovation Awards in 2020 for its OS2-128 long-range sensor, in the vehicle intelligence and transportation category.

Robotaxis, trucks and the sensors they use.

Self-driving and lidar companies sell something that is hard to photograph: software that makes decisions. Their public images therefore lean on a small set of recurring pictures. The most familiar is the robotaxi itself — often a white car or van with a sensor housing on the roof and smaller sensors at the corners — shown on a city street, at a kerb or at an airport drop-off.

A second picture is the view from inside the machine. Companies publish point-cloud renderings, in which a street is drawn as thousands of coloured dots, often bright greens, blues and magentas on black, with boxes marking cars, cyclists and pedestrians. Lidar makers add cutaway drawings of their sensors, showing the spinning or solid-state units that send out the laser pulses behind those images, and rows of compact sensor modules photographed like consumer electronics.

The other pictures depend on the business. Ride-hailing services show phone screens: a map, a pick-up pin, an estimated arrival time and a button to start the ride. Self-driving truck developers show tractor-trailers on long, empty highways, frequently in the desert light of the American Southwest. Driver-assist chip makers show circuit boards, dashboards and diagrams of cars wrapped in cones of sensor coverage.

Trade shows are another stage for these images: the CES technology show in Las Vegas and the IAA Mobility show in Munich are among the places where new sensors, concept vehicles and partnerships are put on display. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — who founded it, who owns it, where it operates and what regulators have recorded — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Lidar, cameras and colour.

Ouster’s range today is built around its OS family of spinning digital lidar sensors. Its website lists the OS0, OS1, OS1 Max and OS2, which English Wikipedia says vary in size and range, and the OSDome, a hemispherical sensor with a 180-degree field of view that Ouster pitches for security, smart infrastructure and autonomous systems. English Wikipedia lists the uses as industrial machines, robotics, drones, mapping, autonomous vehicles, defence and security. Ouster also sells software of its own, including Gemini, BlueCity and Ouster Studio, which it describes as visualisation software.

In February 2026 Ouster widened that range. It completed its purchase of Stereolabs SAS, the French maker of ZED stereo cameras founded in 2010, on 4 February, making it a wholly owned subsidiary led by its co-founders, SecurityInfoWatch reported on 10 February 2026. Ouster says the combination joins lidar, AI vision and perception software in one platform for what it calls “Physical AI.”

Its newest sensors are the REV8 OS family, which Ouster markets as the world’s first native-colour lidar, pairing 3D range data with colour images. In June 2026 Ouster and the contract manufacturer Benchmark Electronics, its long-standing manufacturing partner, said they were expanding their partnership for high-volume production of REV8, LEDinside reported. English Wikipedia says Ouster sensors are made in production facilities in the United States and Thailand; Ouster’s own site describes its OS1 as “Buy America(n)” certified and NDAA compliant.

Some early customers came from delivery and research robots. In 2019, English Wikipedia says, Ouster sensors were fitted to Postmates’ Serve delivery rovers on the pavements of Los Angeles, adopted for testing on Kodiak’s trucks in Texas, and mounted on drones for the DARPA Subterranean Challenge in Pennsylvania mines.

For a design guide, Ouster shows how a hardware company can present lidar as a neutral, general-purpose sensor, sold to robot builders and city planners as much as to carmakers. Compare Hesai, the Shanghai lidar maker, and Nvidia, whose chips process sensor data. For this guide we use graphite, teal and an amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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