Moments before a bankruptcy judge was expected to approve the sale of Luminar’s lidar business, an unidentified party submitted an offer that apparently blew away the initial bid of $33 million.

This bid, which emerged before a hearing on Tuesday, set off a series of rapid-fire meetings between Luminar’s remaining leadership team and its lawyers, a “special transaction committee” formed to navigate the bankruptcy, and ultimately the company’s entire board.

While the bid was “substantially higher,” there were “infirmities” in the offer, according to a Luminar lawyer. The company ultimately decided to stick with the $33 million bid it received from MicroVision at the time an auction on Monday.

The identity of who submitted this long-shot offer was not disclosed, but Luminar’s lawyer said it was an “insider purchaser,” meaning it likely came from company founder Austin Russell.

Russell is here tried to buy the company late last year before it fell into bankruptcy (and after he abruptly resigned as CEO). Representatives of his new company Russell AI Labs previously told TechCrunch he is interested in submitting a bid for the lidar business during the bankruptcy case. (Those same representatives did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.)

The hearing continued, and the sale of MicroVision was approved. Also approved was the sale of Luminar’s semiconductor division to a company called Quantum Computing Inc.

The transactions are likely to close in the coming weeks, and after that, the company will cease to exist, ending one of the buzzier suppliers of the emerging autonomous car era.

What MicroVision wants

Russell’s goal of using lidar to help cars drive themselves will continue at MicroVision, according to its CEO Glen DeVos. As part of the asset sale, MicroVision will get Luminar’s lidar tech as well as the rest of its staff, and he said he expects some of the talent that was laid off before the bankruptcy will also come on board.

For DeVos, Luminar’s lidar technology is the piece that MicroVision is missing from his company’s portfolio. The Redmond, Washington-based company doesn’t have the same profile as leaders in the lidar sector like Aeva, Innoviz, Hesai, or Ouster, but that’s partly because it lacks the high-sensitivity capabilities that are important in automotive.

MicroVision has a “very strong” software team, DeVos said in an interview with TechCrunch, and an equally strong short-range lidar team. But DeVos, who spent a long career at automotive suppliers Delphi and Aptiv, and took over as MicroVision CEO last year, wants to expand beyond its markets of industrial use, security, and defense.

“So when we looked at the Luminar engineering team, and what they’ve done, we said: ‘Hey, that’s a great compliment from an engineering capability standpoint,'” Devos said. “That’s critical in this area in terms of trying to win the automotive business.”

DeVos said she hopes MicroVision can win over existing Luminar commercials to automakers — even the ones that are broken, such as contract with Volvo – and use those as a springboard in automotive, which will represent a huge new pool of potential income for his company.

“I’ve been in the automotive industry for a long time. I’ve had experience where contractual relationships go off the rails, and basically, work hard to put them together. Let’s look at each of those. “You never want to get there, but, you know, there are ways to put the pieces back together.”

A second mystery bidder?

While approval of the sale is behind her, Tuesday’s offer isn’t the first time DeVos and MicroVision have found themselves up against a mystery bidder.

During the hearing, Luminar’s lawyers and Rich Morgner, a managing director of Jeffries (who is helping to run the sales process), revealed that another unknown party formed a bid on January 12.

That bid is problematic from the jump, said Morgner. Initially, the party’s financing came from a “national Chinese company.” When Luminar expressed concerns about regulatory approval, Morgner said the bidder replaced its funding with three different non-Chinese sources.

“One is the money of the family, which we finally managed to verify. The second is an SPV under the Caymans, which has a brokerage statement that shows a round number of funds. And then we also have a European family office that is also part of the financing syndicate,” he said.

While lawyers and bankers were able to verify that the “family money” was reliable, Morgner said the large round number of the Caymans SPV seemed suspicious.

“The concern is the money that came in … (so) the money can go out. It’s not like looking at a long, dated brokerage statement, where you see the ebbs and flows of different securities,” he said. Proof of funds from the European family office source is also not provided.

Luminar’s lawyers did not reveal who the bidder was, or whether it was the same party that submitted the offer that interrupted Tuesday’s hearing.