Luminar Technologies Inc. has announced a collaboration with Volvo Car Corp. (Volvo Cars) to provide its core lidar sensing platform in plans toward deploying safe autonomous vehicles. The new Volvo Cars Tech Fund also announced that its first investment is in Luminar.

Beyond providing sensing technology, Luminar has expanded into a perception development platform. Over the past year, Luminar created 3D lidar data infrastructure, labeling, and annotation tools to take full advantage of the new level of data quality produced by its sensors. Data sharing and close collaboration will be equally important for those developing their self-driving software on top of the Luminar data to quickly accelerate safe autonomy vehicle deployments. Volvo Cars is the first of Luminar’s partners to fully leverage its expanded platform.

Luminar is also helping R&D efforts toward Volvo Cars’ vision to make autonomous vehicles a commercial reality.

“Lidar is a key technology for enabling autonomous cars to navigate safely in complex traffic environments and at higher speeds,” said Henrik Green, senior vice president for R&D at Volvo Cars. “Our collaboration with Luminar allows us to learn more about its promising technologies and takes Volvo Cars one step further to the highly autonomous cars of the future.”

Of Luminar’s four major automotive OEM partners, Volvo Cars is the second to be publicly announced, following the Toyota Research Institute in September 2017.