Business Wire

CA-CEPTON

20.1.2023 15:01:46 CET | Business Wire | Press release

Share
Cepton, Inc. Announces Closing of $100 Million Investment from Koito Manufacturing

Cepton, Inc. (“Cepton”) (Nasdaq: CPTN), a Silicon Valley innovator and leader in high performance lidar solutions, announced today the completion of its previously announced $100 million investment (the “Investment”) from its long-term automotive Tier 1 partner and current shareholder, Koito Manufacturing Co., Ltd. (“Koito”) (TSE: 7276) on January 19, 2023. The Investment, in the form of convertible preferred stock, was approved at a special meeting of Cepton stockholders on January 11, 2023, and is convertible, beginning on the first anniversary of the issue date, into shares of Cepton’s common stock at an initial conversion price of $2.585 per share.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230120005052/en/

To view this piece of content from mms.businesswire.com, please give your consent at the top of this page.

(Graphic: Business Wire)

“We’re happy to announce the closing of the preferred stock investment as we deepen our partnership with Koito,” said Dr. Jun Pei, Cepton’s Co-Founder and CEO. “We plan to deploy the additional capital to help fund our next stage of growth, continue series production execution, and expand our collaboration efforts towards winning additional automotive OEM programs.”

“We’re excited to have completed our third investment in Cepton, which solidifies our commitment to lidar and increasing automotive safety for drivers worldwide,” said Mr. Michiaki Kato, Koito’s President. “This is an important year for us as we work towards commercialization and scale manufacturing of our lidar products. We have a strong track record with Cepton as a partner and look forward to achieving our mutual goal of becoming the leader within lidar.”

Additional details regarding the close of the Investment will be included in a Form 8-K to be filed by Cepton with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Advisors

ICR Capital LLC served as exclusive financial advisor to Cepton and O’Melveny & Myers LLP served as legal counsel to Cepton. SMBC Nikko served as exclusive financial advisor to Koito and Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP and Nishimura & Asahi served as legal counsel to Koito.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release includes “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the “safe harbor” provisions of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements may be identified by the use of words such as “estimate,” “objective,” “plan,” “project,” “forecast,” “intend,” “will,” “expect,” “anticipate,” “believe,” “seek,” “target,” “milestone,” “designed to,” “proposed” or other similar expressions that predict or imply future events, trends, terms and/or conditions or that are not statements of historical matters. Cepton cautions readers of this press release that these forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, most of which are difficult to predict and many of which are beyond Cepton’s control, that could cause the actual results to differ materially from the expected results. These forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements regarding the potential benefits of the Investment, including with respect to Cepton’s financial position and ability to execute on commercialization and mass market deployment goals. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing Cepton’s assessments as of any date subsequent to the date of this press release. Accordingly, undue reliance should not be placed upon the forward-looking statements. Cepton undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statement to reflect events or circumstances after the date on which the statement is made or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events.

About Cepton

Cepton is a Silicon Valley innovator of lidar-based solutions for automotive (ADAS/AV), smart cities, smart spaces, and smart industrial applications. With its patented lidar technology, Cepton aims to take lidar mainstream and achieve a balanced approach to performance, cost and reliability, while enabling scalable and intelligent 3D perception solutions across industries.

Cepton has been awarded a significant ADAS lidar series production award with Koito on the General Motors business. Cepton is also engaged with all Top 10 global OEMs.

Founded in 2016 and led by industry veterans with decades of collective experience across a wide range of advanced lidar and imaging technologies, Cepton is focused on the mass market commercialization of high performance, high quality lidar solutions. Cepton is headquartered in San Jose, CA and has a center of excellence facility in Troy, MI to provide local support to automotive customers in the Metro Detroit area. Cepton also has a presence in Germany, Canada, Japan, India and China to serve a fast-growing global customer base. For more information, visit www.cepton.com and follow Cepton on Twitter and LinkedIn.

About Koito

Under the corporate message, “Lighting for Your Safety”, Koito Manufacturing Co., Ltd. (Koito) has been marking a history of leadership in automotive lighting since its establishment in 1915. Today, the Koito Group consists of 31 companies located in 13 countries worldwide and provides products and services to customers all over the world, through the global network led by five major regions (Japan, Americas, Europe, China, and Asia). Its products, recognized for its high quality and advanced technology, are widely used by automotive makers worldwide. The company is responding to the future transformation of mobility through the development of next-generation lighting technologies and related equipment, control systems, and environmentally friendly products, materials, and production methods. For more information, please visit www.koito.co.jp/english.

To view this piece of content from cts.businesswire.com, please give your consent at the top of this page.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230120005052/en/

About Business Wire

Business Wire
Business Wire
101 California Street, 20th Floor
CA 94111 San Francisco

http://businesswire.com
DK

Subscribe to releases from Business Wire

Subscribe to all the latest releases from Business Wire by registering your e-mail address below. You can unsubscribe at any time.

Latest releases from Business Wire

Octane AI Launches Phoenix, an AI Quiz Builder That Builds, Checks and Improves Quizzes for Shopify Brands21.10.2026 19:15:00 CEST | Press release

Phoenix builds a full quiz from a prompt or a document, catches broken logic before shoppers do and shows what every answer earns in Shopify revenue. Octane AI, the quiz and zero-party data platform for Shopify brands, launched Phoenix in October, its biggest release to date. Merchants describe the quiz they want or upload what they already have, and Phoenix builds it, checks it, personalizes the results and keeps improving it with experiments. One beta customer turned a single document into a complete product-launch quiz: “I attached it to Phoenix, and it built the whole thing, all the pages. It understood everything, not just the text but the logic behind it.” Across all live Octane AI quizzes, 15% of shoppers who finish a quiz place an order. Yet building one has meant hours of writing rules by hand, custom code for design and clicking through every path to find broken results. Phoenix handles those hard parts, from building a quiz to improving it after launch. “Since day one, we've

Cognite Earns Corporate Supplier of the Year Award from Marathon Petroleum Corporation21.10.2026 19:06:00 CEST | Press release

Cognite today announced it has been named Corporate Supplier of the Year winner in Marathon Petroleum Corporation’s 11th Annual Supplier Recognition Awards. The Supplier Recognition Awards is a program sponsored by Marathon Petroleum Corporation to honor suppliers that positively impacted the company’s business throughout the previous calendar year. “There’s a reason ‘Impact’ is one of Cognite’s most important core values,” said Girish Rishi, CEO of Cognite. “For us, the ultimate measure of our performance is delivering quantifiable value for our customers. From that perspective, the Corporate Supplier of the Year award from Marathon is particularly meaningful. Marathon Petroleum is an innovator, and to receive this recognition is a great honor to the Cognite community.” The Supplier of the Year Award from Marathon is the latest honor Cognite has received in 2026: In May, Cognite ranked 15th on CNBC’s Disruptor50 list, honoring venture-backed companies innovating across industries, exp

The Estée Lauder Companies Inc. to Webcast Capital Markets Experience: China Ecosystem Immersion Presentations on November 4, 202621.10.2026 18:48:00 CEST | Press release

The Estée Lauder Companies Inc. (NYSE: EL) today announced that it will webcast presentations from its Capital Markets Experience: China Ecosystem Immersion in Shanghai, China, on Wednesday, November 4, 2026. The event will feature presentations from Stéphane de La Faverie, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Akhil Shrivastava, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, as well as members of the Company’s Executive Leadership Team and local leaders. The presentations will highlight the Company’s strategy and capabilities in China, Beauty Reimagined in action, and how China serves as a blueprint for deploying the Company’s global capabilities to drive sustainable growth and stronger profitability. Due to limited capacity, in-person attendance is by invitation only. Interested parties can access the live webcast on Wednesday, November 4th, beginning at 1:00 p.m. China Standard Time (12:00 a.m. ET) at Investors – The Estée Lauder Companies Inc. A replay of the webcast wi

Future Health and Bridge for Billions to Launch Programme Strengthening Health Entrepreneurship in Emerging Markets21.10.2026 17:50:00 CEST | Press release

New programme will support locally rooted health entrepreneurs to build stronger ventures and deepen their impact in the communities they serve The programme responds to persistent gaps in capital and specialist support for promising health innovation across emerging markets First phase will target around 50 entrepreneurs leading late-incubation to early-acceleration ventures in Africa and Asia Entrepreneurs will receive tailored support, with selected groups later having the opportunity to access Abu Dhabi’s health innovations ecosystem Future Health – A Global Initiative by Abu Dhabi and Bridge for Billions will launch a new entrepreneurship programme designed to strengthen promising health ventures in emerging markets and help locally-developed solutions reach more people. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20261021719421/en/ The first phase of the programme will target around 50 entrepreneurs leading late-incub

Hephaestus Exits Stealth Having Raised $17.2M to Supply Rare-Earth-Free HTS Superconductors and Build Low-Cost Fusion Power21.10.2026 16:48:00 CEST | Press release

CiRi Ventures leads latest funding round as novel HTS magnets head to manufacturing in 2027, ahead of a negative triangularity reactor targeting net energy gain by 2030 Hephaestus today emerged from stealth with solutions that address two of the largest cost drivers in fusion power: the high temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets that confine the plasma, and the edge-localized modes (ELMs – major plasma instabilities) that drive up the cost and complexity of conventional reactor designs. The company also announced the close of a new funding round led by CiRi Ventures. Hephaestus was founded in London in 2019 with a single mission – to help make fusion energy cheap enough to compete on the grid. Its AI plasma solver initially swept the full space of tokamak design parameters, unconstrained by the legacy designs and materials much of the industry is already committed to, and identified negative triangularity (NT), which inverts the D-shaped plasma used in most tokamaks, as the most li

In our pressroom you can read all our latest releases, find our press contacts, images, documents and other relevant information about us.

Visit our pressroom
World GlobeA line styled icon from Orion Icon Library.HiddenA line styled icon from Orion Icon Library.Eye