Cepton Strengthens Detroit Team with Addition of Former GM and Honda Industry Veteran

May 04, 2023 at 09:00 AM EDT

New hire brings years of automotive technology deployment experience to support Cepton’s volume production ramp-up

Cepton, Inc. (“Cepton” or the “Company”) (Nasdaq: CPTN), a Silicon Valley innovator and leader in high-performance lidar solutions, announced today the addition of Luis Gonçalves to its Detroit team as Director of Customer Programs.

In his new role at Cepton, Gonçalves will lead the Company’s Detroit automotive customer programs, enabling volume production ramp through Cepton’ s flagship ADAS lidar program with lead OEM customer as well as future production awards from other automotive customers. He will oversee onsite support to ensure technical success, facilitate engineering change requests and implementation and drive cross-department collaboration to meet project execution goals.

Gonçalves has 14 years of engineering experience in the automotive industry. Before joining Cepton, he spent 9 years at General Motors working as a Senior Lidar Development Engineer, Lidar Performance Engineer for Ultra Cruise, and most recently Engineering Leader of User Experience and Connectivity within GM’s Autonomous Vehicle Technology Program. Prior to GM, Gonçalves was a Quality Engineering Coordinator at Honda North America.

“Cepton is pioneering the mass-market commercialization of lidar, and I am excited to become part of its vision of enabling safe and autonomous transportation for everyone,” said Gonçalves. “In my previous role at GM, I became very familiar with Cepton lidars through extensive benchmarking and testing efforts on real vehicles, in real-world scenarios. I hope to contribute to Cepton’s successful execution of its flagship lidar program through the production validation and volume production ramp phases this year. I also look forward to applying my learnings from the automotive industry to help solidify Cepton’s next series production award.”

“I’m pleased to welcome Luis to our team,” said Mitch Hourtienne, Senior Vice President of Business Development at Cepton. “Luis brings deep experience from his previous roles at GM and Honda supporting the safe deployment of innovative technologies for ADAS and autonomous vehicles. His integral role at GM validating Cepton lidar has helped to bring to market the cutting-edge technology in the reliability-oriented automotive industry.”

“With the addition of Luis to our Detroit team, we continue to expand our presence in the automotive heartland. I’m sure his contribution will help broaden our capabilities to secure and execute additional OEM programs, as we deepen our commitment to helping automakers seamlessly integrate lidar as an essential sensor for safety and autonomy.”

Gonçalves has a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Michigan State University and a M.S. in Automotive Manufacturing Engineering from the University of Michigan.

About Cepton, Inc.

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 Micro Motion Technology (MMT®), 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 the largest known ADAS lidar series production award in the industry to date, based on the number of vehicle models awarded, to support General Motors’ Ultra Cruise program. Cepton is also engaged with all other 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.