Technology
A year and a half ago — January 2019 — I was invited to CES 2019 by the good folks over at HERE Technologies to moderate three days worth of talks. (Here’s the episode I did and a brief video.) Apart from getting seriously sick for those three days — a weird, hugely unpleasant thing for someone who, knock on wood, never gets sick — it was an otherwise fantastic experience. During those several days, I had been invited to some surprisingly fun afterparties; and it was on the last night of my three-day stint in Vegas, at just such a party, that I happened to meet some of the LeddarTech team from Montréal. It’s been far too long for me to remember now, but LinkedIn reminds me that I met with their Product Line Manager, Pier-Olivier Hamel; so you can imagine my pleasant surprise when LeddarTech reached out to me for a conversation with none other than their President & COO, Frantz Saintellemy. What had most intrigued me about LeddarTech when I’d met with Pier-Oliver back in January 2019 was the decidedly novel approach they seemed to take in their pursuit of automotive lidar: a buffet-like platform which enabled other companies to pick and choose components to build their optimal lidar kit. And, oh yeah, it was solid state lidar. Only. This was true then, and it’s still true today. And when I say automotive lidar, I don’t just mean, say, the hardware stack; it’s the entire end-to-end solution, hardware and software alike; sensor fusion; image recognition; the works. All of it. I genuinely don’t know of any other company which is attempting to do this — so obviously, as always, if I’m wrong, please make the appropriate intros — so suffice to say, I was more than thrilled to have the conversation with Frantz today (well, recorded yesterday). Besides the fact that Frantz is one of the most wonderful people I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with in this space, his robust academic and professional engineering background made for an incredibly fascinating discussion, and I think you’re going to love our chat. Hope you’re sitting comfortably, one hour with Frantz Saintellemy, the President and COO of LeddarTech, coming at you from Québec, Canada, begins now.