Oculii

It was a bright June day in 2016. Steven Hong, co-founder and COO of Oculii had just signed a letter of intent agreeing to a 51% stake acquisition by Nexteer Automotive, a global steering and driveline supplier company that developed advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), including features such as forward collision warning, lane departure warning, and other offerings to enhance driver safety and vehicle functionality. ADAS was one of the fastest-growing segments in automotive electronics, and Nexteer had a vision to combine sensor hardware, sensor signal processing, and computer vision capabilities to develop the future of ADAS technologies. Oculii played a key role because of their strong foundation in radar technology capabilities. Oculli’s technology, which had focused primarily on speed enforcement for police and other vehicular law enforcement professionals, would be further developed to cater to automotive applications. In turn, this would enable Oculii to grow beyond their current $3 million in revenues and significantly scale its product offerings to access a new, much larger market. Nexteer had the know-how to take Oculii’s technology to the next level.
Over the next several weeks, as Steven worked with executives from Nexteer to establish a plan and set forth a framework in ADAS development, he realized just how important their technology was to the company and the entire industry as a whole. In the automotive sector, steer-by-wire systems were already being built, but there were no players that were engaged in the sensing side of things in any substantive way. Companies able to combine sensing and steering into one packaged system would have a massive advantage. What Steven was also beginning to sense, however, was something that made him feel a bit anxious and worried. The more he learned about the vision Nexteer had for this technology, both in terms of raw technological contributions and advancements, as well as business opportunities and disruptive leaps in potential for customer use, the more it gave him pause. Something felt off in the way the planning, staging, and timelines were being communicated; the messaging around advanced automation, vehicular vision, and self-driving cars; and, most concerningly, the role that Oculii would be playing in the next generation of automotive technology.
He had a feeling that the deal might not be about partnering but might instead be related to their intellectual property and technology. Steven considered whether it was possible that Nexteer had no real intentions of closing the deal on the terms that they had agreed to and whether they might not, in fact, actually be interested in integrating Oculii into their company.