Ouster Says Rev8 Lidar Gains Early Multimillion-Dollar Orders, Targets Broader Platform Growth

Ouster says its Rev8 lidar platform is gaining early traction, with the company reporting multimillion-dollar orders from new and existing customers. Ouster expects production to scale in the September quarter and continue through the fourth quarter. The company anticipates Rev8 will become the core of its sensing business, while older Rev7 units will remain in the product mix as they are already embedded in customer production programs. Ouster is expanding beyond lidar hardware through native RGB color sensing, Stereolabs software, camera integration, and NVIDIA compatibility, while investing in supply-chain capacity and maintaining over $450 million in cash.

Ouster executives stated that the company expects its recently launched Rev8 lidar platform to become the core of its sensing business over the next several years, supported by early multimillion-dollar orders and a broader push into software, cameras, and sensor fusion. Speaking at an Oppenheimer event, Chief Financial Officer Ken Gianella noted that the company recorded its first full quarter as a unified platform during the second quarter following the Rev8 launch and the introduction of the Stereolabs ZED X Nano camera for robotics. He mentioned that product revenue, excluding royalties, outperformed the company’s initial expectations in the second quarter and is expected to be sequentially higher in the third quarter.

“Rev8 has been very electric,” Gianella said regarding customer reception. He confirmed that Ouster has already booked multimillion-dollar orders from both new and existing customers, although the product is still in the early stages of volume production. Ouster anticipates the ramp to reach greater scale during the September period and continue into the fourth quarter and beyond.

While Rev8 is intended to be a central platform over time, Gianella stated that Ouster’s older Rev7 product is expected to remain part of the portfolio for some time because it is already designed into numerous customer production programs. “As product transitions go, this one’s probably the longest tail that the company’s had in its history,” Gianella said, describing Rev7 as a “real workhorse” for the company.

The company sees growth coming from the overall platform rather than a single sensor, with compute and application-specific software becoming increasingly important over the coming years. Gianella highlighted that Ouster’s diversification across industrial, smart infrastructure, automotive, and robotics markets has helped it avoid becoming dependent on one customer segment or use case. He noted that industrial deployments can help smooth order volatility once customers move into production, while smart-infrastructure customers are increasingly seeking turnkey, no-code systems. Gianella cited the company’s BlueCity offering as an example of its effort to provide an end-to-end intelligent transportation solution.

Chief Executive Officer Angus Pacala explained that Rev8 builds on Ouster’s prior lidar offerings by integrating native RGB color information with depth sensing. According to Pacala, the technology provides color data at every lidar point, which can improve perception systems that otherwise must pair a lidar sensor with a separate camera. Pacala added that the Rev8 architecture combines color and depth sensing at the silicon-chip level using shared optics, aiming to improve synchronization, calibration, and latency compared to separate camera-and-lidar configurations.