Hesai Brand Guidelines: The Shanghai Lidar Maker Listed in New York and Hong Kong

From a methane detector to lidar.

Hesai — in Chinese 禾赛科技, Hesai Technology — is a lidar maker headquartered in Shanghai. Chinese Wikipedia says the company was founded in October 2014; Hesai says it was founded that year by three co-founders: David Li (Li Yifan), its chief executive, who holds a robotics doctorate from the University of Illinois; Kai Sun, its chief scientist, who earned his doctorate at Stanford; and Shaoqing Xiang, its chief technology officer, a Tsinghua and Stanford graduate who had worked at Apple.

Lidar was not its first business. Hesai’s own timeline says an early methane detector business became a commercial success in 2015, before the company showed its first high-performance lidar, the Pandar32, in 2016. In 2017 it launched the 360-degree Pandar40 and opened its first in-house lidar factory, the company says, followed by the Pandar40P in 2018, the Pandar64 in 2019 and the 128-channel Pandar128 in 2020.

English Wikipedia says Baidu chose Hesai as a lidar supplier for its robotaxis in 2018, a choice it links to Hesai’s ability to repair sensors in China within days; Hesai lists Baidu as a lead investor in its series B round the same year, and Bosch, Lightspeed and Xiaomi among later investors.

Nasdaq, Hong Kong and a Pentagon list.

Hesai tried to list on Shanghai’s STAR Market first: Chinese Wikipedia says it filed a prospectus in January 2021 and ended the process that March. It then listed in the United States instead, on Nasdaq under the ticker HSAI, on 9 February 2023; Chinese Wikipedia calls it the largest US listing by a Chinese company since 2021. On 16 September 2025 it added a listing on the main board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, Gasgoo reported that day, describing Hesai as the first lidar company with dual primary listings in the United States and Hong Kong.

Hesai has also been in a legal dispute with the US government. On 31 January 2024 the Department of Defense placed Hesai, with 45 other companies, on its list of “Chinese military companies” under Section 1260H of the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act. According to the federal district court in Washington, the department’s reasoning was that Hesai was a “military-civil fusion contributor” through its affiliation with China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. Hesai sued in May 2024, and The Standard of Hong Kong reported in October 2024 that it had said it was majority-owned by shareholders outside China.

In October 2024 the department delisted Hesai on its original grounds and immediately relisted it on the basis of new information, The Standard reported, citing a court filing. On 11 July 2025 the district court granted summary judgment to the department. On 18 August 2026 the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit reversed that judgment on Hesai’s due-process claim, holding that the company should have been given notice of the unclassified material against it and a chance to respond. The appeals court sent the matter back to the Defense Secretary without setting aside the 2024 designation, and noted that Hesai had been named again on the 2026 list.

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.

From robotaxi roofs to car rooflines.

Hesai’s early Pandar sensors were 360-degree units. Its automotive range came next: Hesai says it launched the AT128, a long-range lidar built on its own chips, in 2021, and that it reached mass-production deliveries in 2022. Later came the solid-state FT120 and the 360-degree QT128 in 2022, the thin ET25 in 2023, the compact ATX and the flagship OT128 in 2024, and in 2025 the JT series of small hemispherical sensors for robots, along with the FTX and ETX. Gasgoo reported in September 2025 that Hesai had been designing lidar-specific chips since 2017 and was on its fourth generation.

English Wikipedia lists carmakers among Hesai’s customers, including Li Auto, which it says became a customer in 2021, as well as Nio, XPeng, SAIC Motor and FAW. Its robotaxi customers have included Cruise, Aurora, DiDi and Pony.ai, the same article says.

Hesai says it has offices in Shanghai, Palo Alto and Stuttgart, and that it runs in-house factories in China and Thailand. Its timeline names the sites: the Maxwell global research and manufacturing centre and the Hertz intelligent manufacturing centre, both opened in 2023, and the Da Vinci global operations centre, which began work in 2024; its European office in Germany opened in 2023. English Wikipedia says Hesai announced a factory in Bangkok in November 2025, and that in January 2026 it set out plans to double its production capacity during the year. The company now calls itself a “Physical AI infrastructure company,” with a range that reaches beyond lidar into a spatial-intelligence platform called Kosmo and robotic actuation modules.

For a design guide, Hesai shows how a sensor maker presents engineering as its identity: products named by series and channel count, and a brand built around lidar fitted to cars and robots. Compare Ouster, the San Francisco lidar maker, and Baidu, an early Hesai customer and investor. For this guide we use ink, a blue and a cyan with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Hesai’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.