Ouster, Inc. (OUST)

Item 2. Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations

The following discussion and analysis of our results of operations and financial condition of Ouster, Inc. (“we,” “us,” “our,” the “Company,” “Ouster”) should be read together with the information set forth in our unaudited condensed consolidated financial statements and the notes thereto included elsewhere in this Quarterly Report, as well as our audited consolidated financial statements and the “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations” included in Ouster’s Annual Report on Form 10-K (the “2025 Annual Report”) filed with the SEC on March 2, 2026. This discussion contains forward-looking statements based upon current plans, expectations and beliefs involving risks and uncertainties, including with respect to the potential future impact of tariffs and other trade measures on the Company’s business and results of operations. Ouster’s actual results may differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements as a result of various factors, including those set forth in the section titled “Risk Factors” in Ouster’s 2025 Annual Report and as may be further updated from time to time in the Company’s other filings with the SEC. The Company assumes no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements for any reason, except as required by law.

Overview

Ouster was founded in 2015 with the invention of its high-performance digital lidar and is headquartered in San Francisco, California. We are a leader in sensing and perception for Physical AI across industrial, robotics, automotive, and smart infrastructure. With a unified platform of high-performance digital lidar, cameras, AI compute, sensor fusion and perception software, and AI models, Ouster delivers solutions that improve quality of life by enabling machines to sense, think, act, and learn in the physical world. To grow our business, we have introduced new product lines and made several acquisitions to accelerate growth. We continue to invest in growing our hardware product portfolio, increasing the capabilities of our software solutions, and opportunistically expanding our sales and marketing efforts.

We are a leading global provider of lidar sensors and solutions. We design and manufacture high-resolution digital lidar sensors that offer advanced 3D vision to machinery, vehicles, robots, and fixed infrastructure assets, which allows each to understand and visualize the surrounding world and enable safe operation and autonomy. We believe our sensors are one of the highest-performing, lowest-cost lidar solutions available today.

Our wholly-owned subsidiary, Stereolabs, which we acquired on February 4, 2026, is a pioneer in AI vision and perception solutions that has developed a leading portfolio of industrial-grade ZED-cameras, AI compute powered by NVIDIA’s platform, and in-house AI vision software to power solutions across robotics, industrials, and smart infrastructure. Its high-performance ZED cameras provide best-in-class 2D and 3D color data with ultra-low latency, and its embedded AI compute hardware facilitates native, real-time sensor fusion at the edge. We believe Stereolabs’s perception software, built on proprietary AI models, is the foundation for thousands of developers’ autonomy workflows. The Stereolabs acquisition positions Ouster as the foundational end-to-end sensing and perception platform for Physical AI.

We have invested heavily in patents since our inception, pursuing comprehensive coverage of invention families and use cases, with broad international coverage.

We believe that our extensive patent coverage creates material barriers to entry.

Products and Solutions

Ouster's hardware product offerings include a broad portfolio of digital lidar sensors, monocular and stereo cameras, and AI compute. On May 4, 2026, we announced the launch of the Rev8 OS family of digital lidar sensors. Powered by our next-generation L4 and L4 Max Ouster Silicon, the Rev8 family features upgraded OS0, OS1, and OSDome sensors and adds the flagship 256-channel OS1 Max. Rev8 introduces the world’s first native color lidar sensors, provides up to double the range and resolution of the previous generation, and is designed for functional safety, reliability, affordability, and scale. Within our OS sensor models, we offer numerous customization options, all enabled by embedded software.

In addition, our portfolio has expanded to include Stereolabs’s growing product line, which now includes the ZED X, ZED X Mini, and ZED X Nano stereo cameras, the ZED X One monocular camera, and the ZED Box edge compute. We are currently developing our solid-state digital flash (“DF”) sensors, which is a suite of short, mid, and long-range solid-state digital lidar sensors that provide uniform precision imaging without motion blur across an entire field of view.

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Ouster provides Physical AI solutions tailored for smart infrastructure applications. Our software solutions, built on proprietary AI models, enable real-time people and object detection, classification, and tracking for actionable, intuitive, and customizable insights while preserving personally identifiable information. Ouster Gemini is our digital lidar powered perception platform designed for security and crowd analytics, logistics, and intelligent transportation systems. Ouster BlueCity is our turnkey real-time traffic management solution for analytics and signal actuation to improve traffic flow, road safety, and urban planning.

Factors Affecting Our Performance

Commercialization of Our Product Offerings. As our customers continue research and development projects that rely on lidar, or a combination of lidar, camera, and AI compute for Physical AI, it is difficult to estimate the timing of ultimate end market and customer adoption. As a result, we expect that our results of operations, including revenue and gross margins, will improve over time but may fluctuate on a quarterly and annual basis for the foreseeable future. As more customers reach a commercialization phase with solutions that rely on our technology, the fluctuations in our operating results may become less pronounced. Our strategic business objectives also include growing the software-attached business, transforming the product portfolio, and executing towards profitability.

Number of Customers in Production. For certain strategic customers and markets, our products must be integrated into a broader platform, which then must be tested and validated to achieve system-level performance and reliability thresholds that enable commercial production and sales. The time necessary to reach commercial production varies from six months to several years, based on the market and application. For example, the production cycle in the automotive market tends to be substantially longer than in our other target markets. It is critical to our future success in each of our target end markets that our customers reach commercial production and select our products in their commercial production applications, and that we avoid unexpected cancellations of major purchases of our products. Because the timelines to reach production vary significantly and the revenue generated by each customer in connection with commercial production is unpredictable, it is difficult for us to reliably predict our financial performance.

Customers’ Sales Volumes. Our customer base is diversified, and we aim to continue to penetrate diverse end markets to increase our sales volumes. Ultimately, widespread adoption of our customers’ products that incorporate our lidar solutions will depend on many factors, including the size of our customers’ end markets, market penetration of our customers’ products that incorporate our digital lidar solutions, our customers’ ability to sell their products, and the financial stability and reputation of our customers.

Average Selling Prices (“ASPs”), Product Costs and Margins. Our product costs and gross margins depend largely on the volumes of sensors shipped, the mix of existing and new products sold and the number and variety of solutions we provide to our customers. We expect that our selling prices will vary by target end market and application due to market-specific supply and demand dynamics. We expect to continue to experience some downward pressure on prices from signing anticipated large multi-year agreements in the near term with multi-year negotiated pricing. We expect that these customer-specific selling price fluctuations combined with our volume-driven product costs may drive fluctuations in revenue and gross margins on a quarterly basis. In addition, we expect that the current uncertainty surrounding U.S. trade relationships may impact our future product costs and margins, particularly to the extent there are significant tariffs or trade restrictions imposed on goods imported from Thailand, Canada, Taiwan or China that are used in our products. Although we are taking steps to mitigate the impacts of potential tariffs, we do not expect to be able to offset or avoid such costs in full. In addition, our contractual arrangements generally provide that our customers will pay the costs of tariffs. These costs could impact customer demand and adoption as described above under “Customers’ Sales Volumes.”

Competition. Lidar is an emerging technology, and there are many competitors for this growing market which has created downward pressure on our ASPs. Absent the introduction of new technology, we expect this pressure to continue to push our ASPs lower in the coming years. However, we believe that because of the simplicity of our digital lidar technology, the increasing capabilities of our software solutions, the value of a complete end-to-end sensing and perception platform, and efficiencies created by our established manufacturing partnerships and suppliers, including Benchmark and Fabrinet. We are well-positioned to scale a set of differentiated offerings that allows us to sustain and potentially increase our gross margins and mitigate pricing pressure over time.

Continued Investment and Innovation. We believe that we are a leading 3D sensing provider. Our financial performance is significantly dependent on our ability to maintain this leading position, which is further dependent on the investments we make in research and development. We believe it is essential that we continue to identify and respond to rapidly evolving customer requirements, including successfully progressing our sensing and perception platform roadmap and developing technologies that will enhance the operating performance of our products. We announced our Rev8 family of products. Our “Chronos” chip has been fabricated by our foundry partner and is now undergoing in-house testing. If we fail to continue our innovation, our market position and revenue may be adversely affected, and our investments in that area will not be recovered.

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Supply Chain Continuity. Some of the key components in the products we have designed or are currently designing come from limited or single source suppliers. If these third parties experience financial, operational, manufacturing capacity or other difficulties, or experience shortages in required components, or if they are otherwise unable or unwilling to continue to manufacture these components in required volumes or at all, our supply may be disrupted or be on less favorable terms. For example, we may be required to seek alternate manufacturers or suppliers for our products. It would be time-consuming, and could be costly and impracticable, to begin to use and qualify new manufacturers, components or designs, and such changes could cause significant interruptions in supply and could have an adverse effect on our ability to meet our scheduled product deliveries and may subsequently lead to the

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Overview

Ouster was founded in 2015 with the invention of our high-performance digital lidar. To continue to grow our business in the coming years, we expanded and plan to continue invest in growing our digital lidar product portfolio, increasing the capabilities of our software solutions, and opportunistically expanding our sales and marketing efforts. We are headquartered in San Francisco, California.

We are a leading global provider of lidar sensors and solutions. We design and manufacture high-resolution digital lidar sensors that offer advanced 3D vision to machinery, vehicles, robots, and fixed infrastructure assets, which allows each to understand and visualize the surrounding world and enable safe operation and autonomy. We believe our sensors are one of the highest-performing, lowest-cost lidar solutions available today across each of our four target markets: automotive, industrial, robotics, and smart infrastructure. Our digital lidar sensors leverage a simplified architecture based on two semiconductor chips and are backed by a suite of patent-protected technology.

We also provide perception software platforms for smart infrastructure deployments. Our software enables real-time people and object detection, classification, and tracking for actionable, intuitive, and customizable insights while preserving personally identifiable information. Our digital lidar sensors leverage a simplified architecture based on two semiconductor chips and are backed by a suite of patent-protected technology.

Our hardware product offering currently includes four models of sensors in our OS product line: the hemispheric field of view OSDome, the ultra-wide field of view OS0, the mid-range OS1, and the long-range OS2. Within our OS sensor models, we offer numerous customization options, all enabled by embedded software. For each of our models in the OS product line, we offer resolution options of 128 lines vertically (“channels”), 64 channels, or 32 channels, as well as many beam spacing options. In 2022, we launched our REV7 OS series scanning sensors powered by L3 chip. REV7 features the all-new OSDome sensor, as well as upgraded OS0, OS1, and OS2 sensors that deliver double the range, enhanced object detection, increased precision and accuracy, and greater reliability compared to our prior generation sensors. We are currently developing our solid-state digital flash (“DF”) sensors, which is a suite of short, mid, and long-range solid-state digital lidar sensors that provide uniform precision imaging without motion blur across an entire field of view.

We also provide perception software platforms for smart infrastructure deployments. Our software enables real-time people and object detection, classification, and tracking for actionable, intuitive, and customizable insights while preserving personally identifiable information. Ouster Gemini is a perception platform designed for smart infrastructure deployments like security and crowd analytics, and is optimized exclusively for Ouster’s digital lidar sensors. BlueCity is a Gemini-powered solution for traffic operations, planning, and safety. BlueCity provides real-time data analytics and predictions, which can be used to improve traffic and crowd flow efficiency, improve urban planning, advance sustainability, and protect vulnerable road users in a wide range of weather and lighting conditions.

We have invested heavily in patents since our inception, pursuing comprehensive coverage of invention families and use cases, with broad international coverage. We believe that our extensive patent coverage creates material barriers to entry for anyone aiming to compete in the digital lidar space.

We believe the simplicity of our digital lidar design gives us a meaningful advantage in costs related to manufacturing, supply chain, and production yields. Our main manufacturing partners are Benchmark and Fabrinet, which manufacture the majority of our products at their facilities in Thailand. We expect this will allow us to continue to reduce our product costs and rapidly scale production to meet our anticipated product demand. Based on cost quotes for our products in mass production, we anticipate our manufacturing costs per unit will decrease further as production volumes increase.

Merger with Velodyne Lidar, Inc.

On November 4, 2022, we entered into an Agreement and Plan of Merger (the “Velodyne Merger Agreement”) with Velodyne Lidar, Inc., a Delaware corporation (“Velodyne”), Oban Merger Sub, Inc., a Delaware corporation and one of our direct, wholly owned subsidiaries (“Velodyne Merger Sub I”) and Oban Merger Sub II LLC, a Delaware limited liability company and one of our direct, wholly owned subsidiaries (“Velodyne Merger Sub II”). On February 10, 2023, we completed our merger of equals with Velodyne pursuant to the terms of the Velodyne Merger Agreement with Velodyne, Merger Sub I and Merger Sub II (the “Velodyne Merger”).

The product offerings we acquired through the Velodyne Merger include the VLP-16, VLP-16 Lite, VLP-16 Hi-Res, VLP-32 and VLS-128. These product offerings are in the final stages of their product life cycle, and we ceased manufacturing them in 2025.

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Amazon Warrant

Amazon.com NV Investment Holdings LLC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc. (“Amazon”), holds a warrant (“Amazon Warrant”) to acquire shares of our common stock. We assumed the Amazon Warrant as part of the Velodyne Merger. As a result of the issuance and sale by the Company of an additional 4,671,406 shares of common stock in the twelve months ended December 31, 2025 in “at-the-market offerings” at prices below the exercise price of the Amazon Warrant, an antidilution adjustment was made in accordance with the terms of the Amazon Warrant, resulting in the increase in the number of shares issuable under the Amazon Warrant by 4,077 shares of common stock and a reduction to the original strike price of the Amazon Warrant to $50.57 per share. As of December 31, 2025, there were 3,271,970 shares of common stock issuable under the Amazon Warrant.

The exercise price and the warrant shares issuable upon exercise of the Amazon Warrant are subject to further antidilution adjustments, including in the event we make certain sales of common stock (or securities exercisable or convertible into or exchangeable for shares of our common stock) at a price less than the exercise price of the Amazon Warrant. The Amazon Warrant is subject to vesting; 50% of the unvested Amazon Warrant as of the date of the Velodyne Merger vested as a result of the Velodyne Merger and the remainder will vest over time based on payments by Amazon or its affiliates to us in connection with Amazon’s purchase of goods and services from us.

Factors Affecting Our Performance

Commercialization of Lidar Applications. We believe that our lidar solutions are approaching an inflection point of adoption across our target end market applications and that we are well-positioned to capitalize on this opportunity. However, it is difficult to estimate the timing of ultimate end market and customer adoption. As a result, we expect that our results of operations, including revenue and gross margins, will improve over time but may fluctuate on a quarterly and annual basis for the foreseeable future. As the market for lidar solutions matures and more customers reach a commercialization phase, the fluctuations in our operating results may become less pronounced. In 2025, our strategic business objectives included growing the software-attached business, transforming the product portfolio, and executing towards profitability.

Number of Customers in Production. For certain strategic customers and markets, our products must be integrated into a broader platform, which then must be tested and validated to achieve system-level performance and reliability thresholds that enable commercial production and sales. The time necessary to reach commercial production varies from six months to several years, based on the market and application. For example, the production cycle in the automotive market tends to be longer than other target markets. It is critical to our future success that our customers reach commercial production and select our products, and that we avoid unexpected cancellations of major purchases of our products. Because the timelines to reach production vary significantly and the revenue generated by each customer in connection with commercial production is unpredictable, it is difficult for us to reliably predict our financial performance.

Customers’ Sales Volumes. Our customer base is diversified and we aim to continue to penetrate into diverse end markets to increase our sales volumes. Ultimately, widespread adoption of our customers’ products that incorporate our lidar solutions will depend on many factors, including the size of our customers’ end markets, market penetration of our customers’ products that incorporate our digital lidar solutions, our customers’ ability to sell their products, and the financial stability and reputation of our customers.

Average Selling Prices (“ASPs”), Product Costs and Margins. Our product costs and gross margins depend largely on the volumes of sensors shipped, the mix of existing and new products sold, and the number and variety of solutions we provide to our customers. We expect that our selling prices will vary by target end market and application due to market-specific supply and demand dynamics. We expect to continue to experience some downward pressure on prices from signing anticipated large multi-year agreements in the near term. We expect that these customer-specific selling price fluctuations, combined with our volume-driven product costs, may drive fluctuations in revenue and gross margins on a quarterly basis. In addition, we expect that the current uncertainty surrounding U.S. trade relationships may impact our future product costs and margins, particularly to the extent there are significant tariffs or trade restrictions imposed on goods imported from Thailand, Canada, China or Taiwan that are used in our products. Our contractual arrangements generally provide that our customers will pay the costs of tariffs. Although we are taking steps to mitigate the impacts of potential tariffs, we do not expect to be able to fully offset or avoid such costs. These costs could impact customer demand and adoption as described above under “Customers’ Sales Volumes.”

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Competition. Lidar is an emerging technology, and there are many competitors for this growing market. Absent the introduction of new technology, we expect this competition to continue to push our ASPs lower in the coming years. However, we believe that because of the simplicity of our digital lidar technology and the value proposition of our lidar solutions, we are well-positioned to scale more effectively than our competitors and to continue to deliver positive gross margins.

Continued Investment and Innovation. We believe that we are a leading lidar provider. Our financial performance is significantly dependent on our ability to maintain this leading position, which is further dependent on the investments we make in growing our digital lidar product portfolio and increasing the capabilities of our software solutions. We believe it is essential that we continue to identify and respond to rapidly evolving customer requirements, including successfully progressing our digital lidar roadmap and developing technologies that will enhance the operating performance of our products. Our “L4” sensor prototypes are generating rich point clouds and have moved into validation testing. Our “Chronos” chip has been fabricated by our foundry partner and is now undergoing in-house testing. If we fail to continue our innovation, our market position and revenue may be adversely affected, and our investments in that area will not be recovered.

Supply Chain Con

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