Tesla is not the one upstart auto business participant having an enormous 12 months.

Luminar, which creates lidar know-how crucial to many automakers’ autonomous driving efforts, goes public on Thursday by way of a particular function acquisition firm (SPAC) and the deal will make Luminar co-founder and CEO Austin Russell a billionaire — on the age of 25.

Russell, who based the corporate as a 17-year-old highschool scholar, mentioned the sensation of changing into a billionaire (on paper, at the very least) is “completely unbelievable” and “completely surreal.”

However the Luminar CEO mentioned it additionally follows the plan his firm has had in thoughts since founding. “It’s completely surreal and it completely is sensible and it’s exhausting to elucidate the dichotomy of it, however this has all the time been the aim,” he mentioned. “We arrange the corporate to be a long-term sustainable enterprise and energy the way forward for autonomy for all of those automakers. We’re in it for the long-term,” Russell advised CNBC’s “Squawk Field” on Thursday morning.

Russell was a little bit of a science prodigy.

“I suppose, I did memorize the periodic desk — I believe I used to be round 2 or so,” Russell told CNBC Make It in a 2018 interview. “I used to be simply obsessive about studying sure issues … simply independently studying and understanding lots of new kinds of scientific fields, amongst different issues.”

That developed into work on lasers and in the end, lidar, which makes use of lasers to detect and measure distance and in the end create a 3D map of the true world surroundings that can be utilized in self-driving.

He ended up at Stanford College learning physics, however dropped out and acquired a Thiel Fellowship, created by tech icon and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel to offer tech expertise with alternate options to conventional education schemes.

Russell mentioned the corporate has a ahead wanting ebook of auto enterprise at $1.3 billion and estimates its general market alternative throughout the multi-trillion auto market at “half a trillion” as lidar and autonomous autos come into focus for the auto business.

Luminar works with automakers together with Volvo, which is owned by Chinese language auto firm Geely.

Whereas Russell mentioned it may be exhausting for the market to worth new applied sciences that lack current market comps, he famous Luminar is working with Intel‘s Mobileye, which additionally centered on the future of autonomous sensing systems. “It is cool to see again in 2017 they had been acquired at a 43x income a number of of the enterprise.”

Luminar, which made the 2018 CNBC Disruptor 50 record, started buying and selling beneath the ticker image LAZR on the Nasdaq on Thursday, after its cope with SPAC Gores Metropoulos was accomplished.

The Luminar CEO shouldn’t be anxious about lidar know-how his agency has constructed change into commoditized IP, saying the rise of this breakthrough know-how is nearer to what chip maker Nvidia does than a tech {hardware} firm. “We have now some of the insane moats of any firm at this stage,” Russell mentioned. “We have constructed out and pioneered core parts … constructing from the bottom up. We have now not used commodity elements. We have now the most important patent portfolio in sensing methods, greater than the highest 5 different lidar R&D efforts mixed.”

Competing lidar applied sciences embody corporations equivalent to Velodyne and Alphabet‘s Waymo.

There may be one notable doubter.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has mentioned that lidar is not needed for autonomous driving to work. “Freaking silly,” had been Musk’s phrases. The world’s latest billionaire, Russell, disagrees.

“I believe 50 business companions and a majority of the main automakers we’re working with would disagree. Cameras and different methods are nice for assisted driving, however with autonomy, that is the place want actually high-performance lidar,” he mentioned, including that Luminar is the one firm capable of present this know-how at manufacturing and to be used at freeway speeds.