Luminar (Nasdaq: LAZR), a leading global automotive technology company, today announced two new key executives have decided to join Luminar.

• Emily Shanklin most recently served as the senior most marketing executive at SpaceX. Prior to joining Luminar, she spent 15 years at SpaceX, leading an Emmy-award winning team responsible for inspiring the public around the company’s efforts to further human exploration of space. Reporting directly to Gwynne Shotwell and Elon Musk, Shanklin provided leadership across all aspects of the marketing & communications function. She will be joining Luminar to help drive and scale its vision to democratize next-generation safety and autonomy, and will report to the Founder and CEO, Austin Russell.
• Kevin Hinge most recently served as the chief supply chain officer at GoPro, successfully developing, building, and shipping millions of action cameras annually in markets across the globe while substantially costing-down the supply chain. Kevin is joining Luminar to consolidate and scale its manufacturing, supply chain, and quality operations, and will also report to the Founder and CEO, Austin Russell.

“Kevin has an outstanding track record of execution, value engineering, and driving efficiency gains for supply chains at global technology companies, including most recently high-volume optical cameras with GoPro. Many of the same principles and efficiencies from his prior supply chain and engineering leadership can be applied to Luminar, as we scale our high-volume production facilities in Mexico and Asia to deliver on our production vehicle models from our partners. Kevin will play a pivotal role in helping Luminar achieve our profitability targets,” said Austin Russell, Founder and CEO of Luminar.

He added “Inspiring others around the impact of SpaceX’s efforts on the future of human space exploration was a key driver for the company’s mission, and it’s clear Emily knocked that out of the park. Similarly, at Luminar she will be working to distill our advanced lidar and software/AI technology for the public, working collaboratively with our automotive partners to realize our higher vision of eradicating vehicle accidents.”

News Source: BusinessWire