Aurora Innovation at Canaccord Genuity Conference: Strategic Advances in Autonomous Trucking

On Wednesday, 13 August 2025, Aurora Innovation (NASDAQ:AUR) outlined its strategic trajectory at Canaccord Genuity’s 45th Annual Growth Conference. The company emphasized its leadership in the autonomous trucking sector, detailing both its achievements and future challenges. Aurora’s robust financial position and strategic partnerships were highlighted, but the competitive landscape and safety concerns remain areas of focus.

Key Takeaways

• Aurora is operating driverless trucks on public roads, with nighttime operations recently initiated.
• The company holds $1.3 billion in cash, funding operations until mid-2027.
• Aurora plans to transition to a driver-as-a-service model by 2027.
• Partnerships with industry leaders like Hirschbach, Uber Freight, and Volvo are central to scaling operations.
• The firm emphasizes safety and transparency, streaming live operations on YouTube.

Financial Results

• Cash Position: Aurora reported $1.3 billion in cash and short-term investments.
• Funding Runway: This financial cushion is expected to sustain operations until the second quarter of 2027.
• Revenue Generation: The company has begun recognizing revenue, signaling early business model validation.
• Per-Mile Cost: Pricing for the driver-as-a-service model ranges from 65 to 85 cents per mile.
• R&D Expenses: Aurora continues to invest heavily in research and development.
• Continental Investment: Over $300 million is being invested by Continental in non-recurring engineering.

Operational Updates

• Driverless Operations: Since April, Aurora’s driverless trucks have covered 20,000 miles, with operations expanding to nighttime.
• Launch Partners: Key partners include Hirschbach, Uber Freight, FedEx, Warner, Schneider, and Volvo Autonomous Solutions.
• Technology Development: Focus for 2025 includes operation in adverse weather conditions, such as rain and wind.
• Second-Generation Hardware Kit: Set for release in early 2026, manufactured by Fabrinet in Thailand, designed to last a million miles.
• Volvo Partnership: Aurora is receiving C-build trucks from Volvo for driverless operations.

Future Outlook

• Expansion Plans: In 2026, Aurora aims to expand across the Sunbelt region, operating over longer lanes and in diverse conditions.
• Customer Endpoints: Plans to reach distribution centers and warehouses by 2026.
• Fleet Size: An increase in the number of operational trucks is anticipated in 2026.
• Safety and Transparency: Aurora showcases its operations via a YouTube channel named "Aurora Driver Alive".
• Competitive Landscape: Despite competition, Aurora believes its technology and scalability offer a significant advantage.

Q&A Highlights

• PACCAR Relationship: The relationship remains positive, though risk profiles differ.
• Observer Interventions: No interventions were needed during the 20,000 miles driven.
• Truck Utilization: Driverless trucks can operate over 20 hours daily, enhancing asset utilization and reducing costs.
• Economic Benefits for Customers: Benefits include lower cost of ownership, improved fuel efficiency, and reduced insurance costs.
• Camera-Only Approach: Aurora advocates for a multi-modal sensing approach, including LiDAR, for enhanced safety.

Aurora Innovation’s presentation at the conference underscores its commitment to advancing autonomous trucking technology while navigating industry challenges. For more detailed insights, refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Canaccord Genuity’s 45th Annual Growth Conference:

George, Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: Eureka is one of Canaccord Genuity sustainability analysts. Thank you for coming to day two of our forty fifth annual growth conference, and we’re incredibly excited to have Aurora with us today, CFO Dave Midey. Short presentation and then some questions. So Dave, please go ahead.

Dave Midey, CFO, Aurora: Awesome. Thanks. Thanks, George. It’s great to be here again. It’s a great event, and I’ll I’ll look forward to talking with all you.

Think maybe just before we get into the q and a, just for those who may not be super familiar with Aurora, I thought we would, you know, just cover a couple of things. Of course, before I do that and to keep the lawyers happy, this is our forward looking statements. So any claims are related to that. So just take a quick look. Alright.

Let’s let’s get into it. Right? So first and foremost, we’re excited to, be operating driverless trucks on public roads. And so, this was our first quarter. This is a video of one of our trucks operating on the lane that we deliver goods on.

And so it’s been really exciting in terms of the progress that we’ve made through the second quarter of the year. So we launched at the April. And then through the June, we operated 20,000 miles. We we we were operating first at daytime, and we started with one truck. We ended up going up to three trucks.

We also just recently launched nighttime as well. So now we’re operating both day and night. And when we work with a lot of partners, our launch partners for driverless were Hirschbach and Uber Freight, but we also have other partners, FedEx, Warner, Schneider, Volvo Autonomous Solutions, others that will be rolling out driverless lanes too in the future. So we are very excited. Look, we we feel like we’re in a really good position as a leader in the autonomous trucking space.

You know, obviously, we are the only company that’s operating and drive with some public roads today. We think the mass it’s a massive market opportunity. It’s a $1,000,000,000,000 market opportunity in trucking. And so we we believe that the Aurora driver can unlock tremendous value, not only safety, which is obviously paramount to our mission, which is to deliver the benefits of self driving technology safely, quickly, and broadly. But also, we’re able to drive down total cost of ownership, and we’re able to increase asset utilization for our customers.

We’re the only player that actually has the strategic partnerships in place to scale a business. So you need to to be able to scale at the tens of thousands, You need OEM partners who are willing to build trucks, scalable platforms, integrated with your hardware at high volume. We have a partnership with Continental, which supports building our hardware kits in the tens of thousands. So we’re really excited about that. From a from a financial perspective, we started to recognize revenue, which is, you know, for a CFO, that’s pretty exciting.

And so just talking about r and d expenses. And but, you know, importantly for us, we’ve got a really strong balance sheet. Right? In this last quarter, we announced that we have 1,300,000,000.0 in cash and short term investments, which allows us to fund our operations into the second quarter twenty seven. We have a driver as a service business model.

We launched as a transportation as a service, and that’s what really for development and initial adoption. That’ll run through ’26. And then starting in ’27, coinciding with the production for our continental kit, we will be able to switch to a driver as a service business model, which will be great for both significant revenue growth as well as SaaS like margin. So we’re really excited. And then, obviously, from a competitive thing, we’re first we think we want that we had that first mover advantage, we want to continue to take advantage of this in our leadership position.

What’s left for ’25? So we’ve launched. Our focus is increasing the number of driverless miles. Obviously, we had a couple of technology unlocks. And the point of this is that we’re trying to twenty five’s all about demonstrating the technology promise.

So we talked about what the Aurora driver can do for people. Now we are going to deliver it. And to be able to deliver that, you need to operate in all kinds of different conditions. Day, night, which we pulled ahead and actually launched. Next up for us is rain and wind.

And then coinciding with that, once you’re able to operate day and night in rain, you’re actually able to open up longer lanes as well. So in ’25, we expect to be able to operate in all these conditions. That sets us up for the following year to be able to really pick up and expand our operations and expand our customer base and expand our fleet. If you’re a carrier, like, this is this is great. Right?

If you can deliver this technology promise and do what happens. Like, you know, my simple takeaway, and this is an example, an illustrative example of Fort Worth to Phoenix. It’s a thousand miles. What does driverless operations give you? It gives you better utilizations of your assets.

So you that same truck can now operate twenty plus hours a day when today it’s operating less than, let’s say, eight hours a day. And then the other thing is we can drive a lower cost of ownership. This is in addition to the safety benefits that you get, the fuel efficiency benefits that you get, and the insurance costs that you get. So really exciting opportunity for both the top end revenue growth and the bottom line margin. And then maybe before I close, I’m super excited about this myself.

You know, we tend to wanna be the standard bearer in terms of, like, safety and transparency and things like this. I’m proud to announce that we have opened up a viewing site. It’s if you go to YouTube, it’s at aurora driver, and it allows you to take a look at our trucks operating on the roads, driverless every day between 8AM and 5PM central time. And, you know, so it’s not too monotonous. We we switch between different views, but these are our trucks operating each and every day.

And we’re really excited to be the kind of the standard bearer in the industry. And so with that, I will turn it over to George and we can talk about questions.

George, Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: There we go. Also, we watch the video often. It’s very relaxing, by the way. It’s very ASMR is a word that I’ve learned from my from my daughters, so it’s I suggest to the audience that take some time to watch the video. You need to calm down.

So I’d like to first ask about the relationship with PACCAR. And, you know, you’ve sort of had a little bit of a change in strategy since your first autonomous truck launch. You have what’s called an observer in the vehicle. I’d like to ask, first, can you update us as to how many autonomous miles you’ve driven and whether or not this observer has had to intervene at all in any of those?

Dave Midey, CFO, Aurora: Yeah. First and foremost, the Aurora driver operates the vehicle. It’s designed to operate the vehicle at all times and in all conditions even if we had to pull over to the side of the road for a tire blowout, an engine failure, or the Aurora driver lidar was struck by a bird. Like, we have to operate safely at all times. That’s how it’s designed.

We actually operate in what we would refer to it as driverless mode. So it it operates all the times. We did 20,000 miles, through June. I’m not gonna disclose where we’re at today, but I will tell you we will be higher than the second quarter without a doubt. And, no, the front seat observer has never needed to intervene, and we don’t expect them to have to intervene in the future.

And, you know, I I might also say, and and while, you know, our relationship with PACCAR, even though that optically it looks a little bit weird, you know, we can respect their opinion and and their risk profile versus, like, what we think is incredibly safe product and still have a really great relationship going forward. Like, I’ve been married thirty years. Every once in a while, you don’t agree with your partner, but that doesn’t mean that, you know, you throw away the marriage. And so in this particular case, we had an observer in the rear seat a lot of the time. Not all the time, but a lot of the time.

And I think there’s a benefit of that. If you think about an early rollout, having this observer doesn’t prohibit us from any of our development or expansion or anything else. It is not prohibiting us from from moving forward and developing our plan. And you do get feedback, right, on the behavior. So the analog, I’d say, is like Waymo.

Waymo is a very successful ride hailing company, but they also get feedback all the time from their customers. Every ride, they get to get input on the ride and the behavior. You know, unfortunately for us, we carry goods. So toilet paper can’t fill out a survey. So, you know, front seat observers, it’s actually not the worst thing in the world.

And, you know, when you think about the crawl, walk, run approach, we really think about the future. This front seat observer is just on this initial launch truck of vehicles. It is not relevant for any other vehicles that we’re gonna be launching when we get their scalable platforms or any other vehicle that we want. So this is just with this initial launch fleet of trucks. So we think it’s we think it’s okay.

And you know, we continue to move along. And we’re really excited because they are all driverless. And again, check out Aurora Drive Alive, and I think you’ll get a good view of what an observer does. They observe. So they’re not hovering over the wheel or anything like that.

They’re sitting back. I mean, sometimes you’ll see them twiddling their thumbs, but you know, they are actually observing.

George, Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: You mentioned some of the signposts to scale that you have this year, slide presentation. Can you just help us understand how that what that looks like maybe in 2026? What can we look at additional lanes, etcetera, weather condition?

Dave Midey, CFO, Aurora: Yeah. So ’25, again, all about the technology promise. Right? So do the things that we can operate. And if you think about, like, customer adoption, you kind of have to do those things before customers are going to go all in on anything anyways.

If you can only operate in daytime, dry conditions, that’s great. And it’s a tremendous progress because we can operate in all the conditions, construction, heavy congestion, things like that. But it’s not enough to be an integral part of somebody’s business because sometimes you end up being late because of construction. And so what happens if you go into nighttime? Sometimes you get rain.

And we need to be able to operate in enough conditions. So 20 all about being able to operate in a sufficient set of conditions. This sets us up for ’26 when we have a couple of things going on. The first thing we have is our second generation hardware kit will be available in early twenty six. Alright.

We can’t build a quantum of trucks until we get that second generation hardware kit. This kit will be cheaper. It will be it will last longer. It’s designed to a million miles. We’ve designed and engineered it, but it’s being manufactured by Fabrinet in in Thailand.

So therefore, we can build into the hundreds and thousands of trucks with this particular kit. The second thing is we kind of drive in more spots. It’s great to be able to drive in Texas and in Arizona and New Mexico, but we want to be able to operate over the Sunbelt. So we will open up lanes throughout the entire Sunbelt in 2026. Right?

And I think those are two really important things. The last thing is we are gonna start going to customer endpoints. So, yes, we operate through terminals today. That’s great for development, and it’s great for some some coast to coast operations where drivers couldn’t make the whole route anyways. But ultimately, you wanna get to a customer’s distribution center or warehouse.

So those are the three things that we’re gonna do that are gonna lock the customer adoption, and we’ll expect to be operating trucks significantly more trucks in ’26 than we are in ’25.

George, Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: You have a relationship with Volvo. You talked about getting more trucks from them by the end of this year. What’s the timeline to production ready trucks from Volvo? And and when they do get on the road, do you expect them to be fully driverless? Or will there be an observer there as well?

Dave Midey, CFO, Aurora: Okay. So we are getting trucks right now as we speak and throughout this year. They refer to it as c builds. These are essentially the scalable platform trucks that they intend to that we intend together to operate driverless with no front seat observer. So there’s no requirement for a front seat observer.

These trucks are not ready yet. They still they still have validation and work to do on their side for the components on the software side in particular to validate. But these trucks that we’ll have and we’ll start operating on, we’ll be using them for development. We’ll be using them for bring up for our second generation hardware kits, and they will be using them to carry commercial loads with vehicle operators. So they’ll be driven autonomously with vehicle operators.

Once they’ve completed their validation efforts and their work, they these same trucks will then just transition over to driverless trucks. And so we’re really excited about the progress. We’ll let them define when the timing is, but I would expect that, you know, ’25, you will not see them driverless, and we’re working really hard to have them driverless in ’26.

George, Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: There’s a big player in trucking in The United States, Daimler. They currently have an internal solution called torque. I think many people in the audience know who that is. What’s the potential to maybe become a second source there over time?

Dave Midey, CFO, Aurora: So I would say this. We we believe in choice. We believe in competitive pressures. I think our customers wanna have options. And so today, we have two partners that represent roughly 50% of the market.

And we think that that’s exciting in terms of development. We would expect at some point, the Aurora driver is the essential and the best Aurora, you know, self driving solution out there. And we would expect it to be on all trucks. And so I definitely can see a future where that happens. I mean, that’s obviously something that they have to work on with their contractual commitments of what they have.

But we would be open to putting the Aurora driver on that. And I can see a future where the Aurora driver’s on all the trucks in The US.

George, Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: It’s an enormous market. We completely agree with you that there’s huge potential, about 200,000,000,000 miles plus just in this country that are driven by class a trucks. There’s torque that’s a competitor. There are others who are vying for a position in this space just because of its the huge economic potential. What do you expect the competitive environment to look like?

You know, you fast forward three to five years. Waymo was a competitor at one point. They they dropped out. They’re focused on robotaxis. So do you expect that to come in out?

Long winded question, but like how many competitors do you expect over the long term

Dave Midey, CFO, Aurora: in this business? It’s a trillion dollar market. There’s gonna be competitors. You know, there’s been a lot of competitors. And and you know, everybody likes to predict the positioning

And, you know, it used to be too simple with, you know, the leader and they’re no longer around. And then they’ve reinvented themselves into a different company. And, you know, you’ve had Embark and things like that. It’s a tough business. Like, the folks that say that it’s easy and that you can do it really cheap and you’re I’m going to be so much more efficient.

I probably don’t have the right appreciation for how challenging and difficult this is. But it’s a trillion dollar market, so there’s always going to be competitors. I would expect a handful will offer some sort of self driving service at some point. I think we have a multiyear lead, just to be honest. And I also think we’re one of the few or the only that’s really set up to scale a business.

And I think there’s a difference between operating on one lane and getting yourself ready to scale business. So I I think, you know, there’ll be some competitors out there and, you know, competition breeds creativity, innovation, and competition is good for the industry. So, you know, we welcome competition. I would tell you, I am probably more concerned with people trying to catch up and maybe doing things unsafe that could impact the industry. But, you know, there’s a lot of, you know, there’s a lot of really talented people out there.

And, you know, I give a lot of credit to everybody for for going down this endeavor. Autonomous vehicles in trucking is needed, and, you know, we’re excited about the future.

George, Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: There are a couple phases to your business approach versus proving the technology this year, which I believe you’ve done. Next is expansion, but also bringing the cost down, right, to make sure you can get to these SaaS like margins. So can you talk about your relationship with Continental in that context? How confident you are that once you begin to scale with them, I think it’s in 2027, that you can get to the right level of of hardware cost such that we can see this margin improvement over time? So

Dave Midey, CFO, Aurora: our relationship with Continental has been fabulous. It’s really been exciting. And, you know, I think they would they would equally say the same thing. They’re always excited for us to come be at their events, and we’re always excited for them to talk about the partnership. That doesn’t mean that you don’t have conflict.

That doesn’t mean that it’s not hard. But when you have shared beliefs and kind of the vision and you’re working on something that has shared benefits and you’re working on the aligned goals and you have a mutual respect, that’s a framework for partnership. And so our partnership’s great. Continental is obviously going to be spinning off their automotive division to Movio, right, in September. And when that happens, this project is one of their cornerstone projects, which they talk about.

So excitement level is there. In terms of cost targets and and and and, you know, our our our path to get there, we’re really excited. We think we’re on track. And it is not, like a big source of concern for me in terms of like our risk profile in terms of the margins. You know, there’s there’s always gonna be a center to like delta that might be in there, but like overall, this is like, we’ve got a pretty good track.

You know, we we have a target. We’re starting to get bids and sourcing for each of those that Continental is doing and it looks to be well on track. So we’re excited.

George, Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: You have a really interesting relationship and economic model with Continental. For those who in the audience who may not know, can you just sort of describe that relation?

Dave Midey, CFO, Aurora: Yeah. So the traditional tier one to OEM relationship is the OEM ask them to build a a a component. They sell them that component. The the OEM buys the component. They put it on the truck, and then they sell the complete truck.

It’s kind of a point in sale model, and our model is different. We we kind of believe in the shared benefits in in the economic profiles. If you think about the trucking industry, most of the trucking industry, shippers pay carriers a price per mile. They’re gonna pay us a price per mile to drive the trucks. We’re gonna pay Continental a price per mile for that hardware kit.

And so instead of this point in sale, we’re going to be paying them a per mile cents per mile charge every time we drive a vehicle. So the Aurora driver drives a vehicle. And they’re making a significant upfront investment. So they’re spent they’re spending over $300,000,000 of upfront NRAs on nonrecurring engineering that will be paid back in this price per mile over time. So it’s the first time that it’s been done in the industry, for sure.

And for them, there’s this reoccurring predictable revenue, which is really exciting for them, and they’re making an investment in the future. One of the other things is they’re making investments, they’re going to develop their what they call, a minimal risk maneuver system, a lane b, a secondary system to pull over in the event that the the primary operating system had had a fault or something like that. So that’s the part of the redundancies. They’re able to develop that and then use that technology to deploy in other markets. So they’re looking at it as a as a great way to get into new businesses.

They’ve got a reoccurring revenue stream. And so for us and they’re also financing the vehicles, all the components. So that’s part of the charge. They’re also doing the service and warranty of all the vehicles, and that goes into that charge as well. So for us, we have a fixed cost that we pay cents per mile that’s very predictable over time.

And they get incentivized. And they’re incentivized to make sure those trucks are always on the road.

George, Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: Any questions from the audience? My friend Keith.

Dave Midey, CFO, Aurora: Didn’t take that one through, did you?

Keith, Unidentified speaker: Hi, thank you. I guess when you walk through the economics, can you walk through what the cost is to outfit a truck? And then when you look at it from a trucker perspective, obviously they’re saving on the driver, but how much of those economics are saving of the driver versus higher, like hours of service is a big issue for the truckers? You’re gonna basically drive this thing a lot more utilization. Can you just kind of walk through some of the assumptions behind those numbers?

Dave Midey, CFO, Aurora: Yeah. So I can’t give you the specific cost because we don’t disclose them. But what I can tell you, I can try to answer your question this way. So a traditional truck driver’s hours of service limitation is 11. They operate well less than that.

You know, maybe on average, like, eight hours of productivity a day would be a high number. Our trucks can go, you know, conceivably twenty four hours. Let’s say that you’re conservatively, you can double that utilization. So every truck can be operating double the time. So that’s just from an asset utilization perspective.

There’s a ton of top end growth. It does a couple of things. It it means that they have more productive assets, and maybe they even need fewer assets at a given time, but they also can deliver goods faster than they could before. It creates new opportunities for, like, if you’re FedEx and you had a lane that you had to do, you know, like a flight to get to a certain spot in a certain time. Now you can do it with trucking.

So those are interesting opportunities on the on the revenue side. On the cost side, what we’ve said before is the driver cost continue to increase. You know, the latest ATRI number for driver cost alone is a dollar, plus you have indirect costs associated with that. We’ve given some indicative pricing of 65 to 85¢ for our driver as a service model. So that’s our long term model.

So there’s a substantial opportunity to get lower costs just for driver costs. Then you have fuel efficiency. Our trucks versus, like, traditional truck drivers, at least 15% more fuel efficient. You have reduced frequency and severity of incidents, and that’s kind of the primary point of this. So there’s a there’s a ton of opportunity to drive the cost down.

So we do expect it to be able to do both top and bottom. We own we are paying so when when a customer, like, buys a truck equipped with the Aurora driver, they’re just buying a truck. They’re not buying our hardware. Everything, all the costs, the hardware costs, our software costs, our data services costs, what we pay Continental, those are all included in the per mile fee. So for them, they have a very predictable cost model, and that should drive substantial savings for them.

So that’s what I can tell you. Sure. I the easiest compare and contrast is we are actually operating driverless, and they’re not. So I’m not convinced. I don’t know.

I don’t know. George might disagree with me on that. We believe in everything for us is guided on safety. We believe in a multimodal sensing approach where LiDARs, cameras, and radars all provide value and input. Certainly, for the vast majority of times, a camera could probably do the majority of the jobs that need to be done.

But we don’t think they’re sufficient for all the times. And if you’re Tesla, you have a FSD system that has a driver in the vehicle. Right? And so technically, they’re supposed to be able to take over at any individual time. It’s unclear to me that Tesla’s ever going to get to a world where they truly are driverless in all these scenarios.

And we’ll see. Right? Like, they’re gonna be able to do it. They’re piloting it out now on passenger cars. Trucking’s different.

Right? Trucking’s an 8,000 pound 80,000 pound tractor trailer driving 75 miles an hour. And so for me, I I feel like that’s a different solution set. You need to be able to see longer. You need to be able to predict better than what you than what you really need to do in passenger cars.

So for us, we believe this is the right technological approach. We think Waymo has a very similar technological approach. They’re the leader in the ride hailing space. We believe we’re the leader in the trucking space. So if there’s ever a world where we need less components, we would do that.

But frankly, we we had to develop our own proprietary first light lidar because we did not think that even the existing lidars on the shelf would allow us to safely operate trucks. And so we now have our own proprietary first light lidar that we purchased in 20018 and developed. It allows us to see nine seconds further than a traditional lidar. Imagine nine seconds with a tractor trailer and being able to plan your route and see things in advance nine seconds faster. It just makes you more safe.

And there are plenty of instances where in the nighttime, a camera cannot see something that a LIDAR can see. Like, it’s just it’s just a fact. So we’re gonna focus on our approach and, you know, hopefully, you know, we’ll continue to learn and adapt accordingly.

George, Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: Thank you, Dave. Thanks, man. Appreciate it.

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