The smell of burnt vegetation wafted through a lettuce field here one recent summer morning as nearly 200 farmers, academics and engineers gathered to witness the future of automated agriculture. Thirteen hulking machines with names like "Weed Spider" and "Mantis" crawled through rows of romaine. One used artificial intelligence cameras to scan the crops and spray them with herbicides. Yet another deployed robotic arms to cultivate and pick through the foliage. "It's a hurdle for people to get over, but the reality is, the numbers don't lie," said Tim Mahoney, a field representative for Carbon Robotics, a Seattle-based company that created one of the machines on display -- a 9,500-pound apparatus known as the LaserWeeder.

The transaction provided Luminar with the infusion of capital it needed to begin producing lidar sensors that use lasers to measure distances and classify objects for self-driving vehicles at a commercial scale, according to Chief Financial Officer Tom Fennimore. As a public company, however, Luminar must be mindful of how it spends the cash, he added. Luminar has positioned itself in recent years to benefit from the expected rise of autonomous vehicles. It has announced partnerships with car makers including Volvo Cars, which is owned by China's Zhejiang Geely Holding Group, Daimler AG's trucks business and SAIC Motor Corp. Ltd. to incorporate its sensor technology into self-driving vehicle designs. The Morning Ledger provides daily news and insights on corporate finance from the CFO Journal team.