There are lots of companies working on low-end LIDAR. ASC's technology is known to work well; it just costs too much because it involves custom sensor ICs built with a nonstandard GaInAs process. Quanergy has been issuing a lot of press releases and getting funding, but they seem to have backed off from their < $100 solid-state sensor and are now selling $7500 rotating machinery like Velodyne's spinning top. There are also some companies touting continuous-wave systems, which usually don't work in sunlight or have much range, but are useful for indoor robots.
Fraunhofer is working on a technology for making flash LIDAR sensors using a regular CMOS process.[1] If that works, these things will come down to digital camera prices in volume.
Bloomberg has most acquisition information. I picked this up because I've been following ASC since the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge days, when I went to Santa Barbara to see their technology. It was just on an optical bench then, not ready to deploy, but they had the technology with long-term promise. I dragged a VC down there to talk to them, but he didn't see near-term volume application. He was right; only now is there a market in sight for LIDAR units by the millions. High production volume is probably still 5-10 years away.
[1] https://www.ims.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ims/de/documents/D...
[1] http://www.int-arch-photogramm-remote-sens-spatial-inf-sci.n...
As a side note, how do you guys find out things like who buys who and whos's got what interesting tech? Especially when they're selling only to suppliers, as is the case here? You just stumble on the information, know someone who knows someone or what?