Luis Dussan

Co-Chief Executive Officer

Luis Dussan is an executive leader, engineer, entrepreneur, and inventor with a career spanning aerospace, defense, and advanced automotive technology. Over more than sixteen years in the Aerospace and Defense industry, he contributed to programs at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab during the Mars Pathfinder mission and later at Lockheed Martin’s Missiles and Fire Control Division. At Lockheed, he worked in the Advanced Concepts group on ISR and targeting systems including the Airborne Laser Program and Advanced Targeting Pod, which has been widely deployed across U.S. air combat platforms. He earned multiple awards for innovation and guided several advanced prototype programs, many of them classified. After Lockheed Martin, Luis joined Northrop Grumman as Chief Technologist in the Laser Systems division, where he was one of several Chief Technologists shaping the company’s research strategy. His work focused on new sensing solutions in intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and autonomy. In 2013, Luis left Northrop Grumman to pursue entrepreneurial ambitions. He founded a new venture focused on robotic vision, where his team demonstrated the first high-speed random-access MEMS lidar scanner to the Air Force Research Laboratory. That company became AEye Inc., which under his leadership developed its lidar system, raised funding from leading investors such as Kleiner Perkins, GM, Intel, and Airbus, and went public on the Nasdaq Exchange in a $1.5 billion IPO in 2021. Luis continues to serve on the board of AEye Inc. ($LIDR). In 2024, having recognized gaps in how mature technologies could benefit the sense and awareness tech sectors, Luis co-founded Illium AI with Dr. Adrian Kaehler. Along with his leadership he brings deep expertise across electro-optics, sensor design, sensing and perception algorithms, augmented reality solutions, applied Gen AI, software development, and complex system design. At Illium, his focus is on applying these skills to build a more human‑friendly way to get information about the world around us.