Why LIDAR Is Consolidating Now
Innoviz CEO Omer Keilaf on the L4 Gold Rush, the L3 Unlock, and Why the Music Has Stopped
This is the second post in our LIDAR series. The first covered how LIDAR works.
Today’s post is a conversation with Innoviz CEO Omer Keilaf on the state of the LiDAR market. Keilaf argues the market is consolidating toward one or two Western suppliers, and that Innoviz is already positioned among them.
A timely insight from the interview: at CES 2026, roughly 85 percent of Keilaf’s meetings focused on Level 4 autonomy, driven by Waymo’s momentum and a growing robotaxi gold rush. At the same time, Level 3 programs that had stalled for years are reaccelerating. OEMs had tightly coupled ADAS timelines to EV platform transitions, and EV delays became a bottleneck. That coupling is now breaking, putting Level 3 back on the roadmap.
Other insights include:
How Innoviz earned BMW’s trust and used a Tier 2 to Tier 1 progression to scale responsibly.
Why the SPAC was a competitive necessity, and how Tier 1 NREs now fund R&D through long automotive ramps.
Why LiDAR is consolidating, with Keilaf arguing the “music has stopped.”
How design constraints stalled adoption, and why behind-the-windshield is the winning form factor.
Why Level 4 demands true 100 percent availability, and how that shapes Innoviz’s architecture.
How automotive-grade reliability creates pull in non-automotive markets with faster cycles and higher ASPs.
Paid subscribers get the full transcript below.
An Interview with Innoviz CEO Omer Keilaf
Hello listeners, today we are joined by Omer Keilaf, CEO of Innoviz Technologies. We’re going to talk about the LIDAR market, how Innoviz differentiates, and where the future of LIDAR is headed. Omer, welcome to the podcast.
OK: Hi, thank you for inviting me.
Why Start a LiDAR Company?
You bet. So let’s start back at the beginning. Take us back to 2016. What did the LIDAR market look like back then and what convinced you there was room to build a new company?
OK: I think it was actually quite obvious that LIDARs were a bottleneck to enable self-driving vehicles at scale. The best-in-class LIDARs at the time were huge and super expensive.
My background is full of many developments where I was in startups or other places where I have shrunk big optical devices into very small designs. And that looked like a very interesting problem to solve. I personally come from a personal story of my own family, where my sister was involved in a very serious car accident.