ORLANDO, Fla.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today, Luminar (NASDAQ: LAZR), a leading global automotive technology company, announced certain key executive updates that include Alex Fishkin joining as Chief Legal Officer, Michael Southard as Vice President of Engineering, and Marc Losiewicz appointed as Chief Business Officer and General Manager.
“We’re setting Luminar up for success in 2025 with leadership enhancements to help us achieve our two main goals for next year: strong growth and increased efficiency,” said Austin Russell, Luminar Founder and CEO. “Luminar’s leading position to enable global automakers to achieve drastically improved assisted and autonomous capabilities on production vehicles continues to attract top talent in the industry.”
Michael Southard joins Luminar to lead day to day LiDAR engineering activities for the company, with a focus on realizing greater efficiency and R&D leverage as the company concludes its development work on the Iris family of products, and focuses on Halo and beyond. He joins us from leading the hardware team at Block (formerly Square), and prior to that a leader in VR Hardware at Meta. He also has a long history of leading product development across a wide range of technologies at companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google. Mr. Southard’s experience and leadership come at a key inflection point in Luminar’s trajectory now that its technology is in series production, and customers are clamoring for the upcoming technologies in Luminar’s pipeline.
Alex Fishkin, who previously served as Luminar’s Chief Legal Officer for three years, will return to the company. Mr. Fishkin is an accomplished business and legal executive and former engineer, with broad experience advising both public and private global technology companies. Mr. Fishkin was a professor of Law at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, and has held legal leadership positions at technology companies both large and small, spanning all the way back to Google prior to joining Luminar as its first General Counsel. Mr. Fishkin’s experience in operating highly efficient legal teams and advising companies to navigate industry challenges will be strong assets to the company and its growth.
Marc Losiewicz will now serve as Chief Business Officer and General Manager for the company, after more than four years at Luminar. Mr. Losiewicz has previously held various senior roles, including most recently as Chief of Staff and Vice President of Business Development. Prior to Luminar, he was responsible for managing a one billion dollar P&L for the assisted driving platform at ZF, one of the largest automotive Tier 1 manufacturers, and began his career as an engineer. His wealth of experience and knowledge of the automotive and technology industries will be invaluable to helping Luminar achieve its mission.
About Luminar
Luminar is a global automotive technology company ushering in a new era of vehicle safety and autonomy. For the past decade, Luminar has built an advanced hardware and software/AI platform to enable its various partners, ranging from Volvo Cars and Mercedes-Benz to NVIDIA and Mobileye, to develop and deploy the world's most advanced passenger vehicles. Following the launch of the Volvo EX90 as the first global production vehicle to standardize its technology, Luminar is poised to lead the industry in enabling next-generation safety and autonomous capabilities for global production vehicles. For more information please visit www.luminartech.com.