Aurora Innovation at Oppenheimer Conference: Autonomous Trucking Insights

On Monday, 11 August 2025, Aurora Innovation (NASDAQ:AUR) presented its strategic advancements at the Oppenheimer 28th Annual Technology, Internet & Communications Conference. Highlighting its progress in autonomous trucking, Aurora emphasized its robust financial position and innovative technology, while acknowledging the challenges of scaling operations and expanding market reach.

Key Takeaways

• Aurora Innovation is currently operating driverless trucks on public roads and plans to expand operations to new lanes by the end of the year.
• The company maintains a strong balance sheet, with liquidity sufficient to fund operations into 2027.
• Aurora’s "driver as a service" model aims for capital efficiency and increased shareholder value.
• The introduction of second-generation hardware in 2026 is expected to enhance production volumes and reliability.
• Aurora’s focus on safety and transparency is demonstrated through its comprehensive safety case framework and the launch of "Aurora Driver Live" on YouTube.

Financial Results

• Liquidity: Aurora ended Q2 with $1.3 billion in liquidity, ensuring operational funding into 2027.
• Capital Requirements: The company estimates needing to raise $650-850 million to achieve positive free cash flow.
• At-the-Market Mechanism: Raised $331 million last quarter through this financial strategy.

Operational Updates

• Driverless Operations: Aurora is actively operating driverless trucks, with nighttime operations achieved ahead of schedule.
• Weather Adaptability: By year-end, Aurora aims to operate in rain and heavy winds.
• Lane Expansion: Plans to extend operations to new routes, including Fort Worth to El Paso to Phoenix.
• Hardware Developments: Second-generation hardware is set for 2026, with a third-generation kit to follow, enabling larger-scale deployment.

Future Outlook

• Technology Promise: 2025 efforts focus on enhancing the Aurora Driver’s capabilities in diverse weather conditions and expanding operational lanes.
• Commercialization Plan: Aurora follows a "crawl, walk, run" approach to integrate into the trillion-dollar trucking market.
• Revenue Growth: Significant revenue increase anticipated in 2026 with fleet expansion and focus on early adopters.

Q&A Highlights

• Technology Elements: Key technologies include proprietary software with verifiable AI, custom FMCW LiDAR, and advanced simulation tools.
• Target Market: Aurora targets the commercial trucking sector due to its size, demand, and favorable unit economics.
• Safety Standards: Over 10,000 requirements and 2.7 million tests underpin Aurora’s safety framework for daytime operations.
• Balance Sheet Strategy: Commitment to a strong balance sheet ensures liquidity and supports long-term growth.

Readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript for detailed insights.

Full transcript - Oppenheimer 28th Annual Technology, Internet & Communications Conference:

Colin Rusch, Lead, Sustainable Growth and Resource Optimization Practice, Oppenheimer: Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Oppenheimer’s twenty fifth annual tech conference. We are thrilled to have David Maday, CFO of Aurora Innovations here joining us, today. My name is Colin Rusch. I lead the sustainable growth and resource optimization practice, which is looking at a variety of industrial and physical AI practices, and, this is one of our favorite names. We’re gonna do a a quick intro, with David, providing a little bit of an overview on the platform, and then we’ll get into q and a.

So with that, David, take it away.

David Maday, CFO, Aurora Innovations: Thanks a lot, Colin. I appreciate you, having me, and it’s a pleasure to, be here with everybody. Before we jump into the q and a, let me just give you a a a real brief overview for those who may not be as super familiar with Aurora. But, before I do that, let me just make my lawyers happy, provide you some cautionary statements regarding our forward looking, statements. Okay.

With that, let me just, kick off with the the the real important thing, is, hey. We are operating driverless trucks on roads today, and think that that is, super important for us, and it’s super important for the industry. And we’re, really excited, about the progress that we’re making. And so the right here, you can just see a a little video, from one of our first runs operating on, the highway, going from Dallas to Houston. With that, let me start with a little bit more about Aurora and, kind of just, like, where we’re at.

So Aurora, its mission is to deliver the benefits of self driving technology safely, quickly, and broadly. And we think we’re really in a pole position, for this. We’re again, the we’re the only company with driverless commercial operations on public roads and trucking. We think trucking is a massive market and opportunity for Aurora. It can unlock tremendous value.

And we think, you know, when we look at our partnership ecosystem, we are the really the only player out there today that has a partnership ecosystem both in the OEM and in the supply base side to really commercialize at scale. We have we’re we’re operating from a really strong balance sheet and financial position. We have liquidity after the second quarter. We have liquidity to fund our operations into the 2027. We’ve got a really attractive driver as a service business model that supports, you know, shareholder value with a really capital efficient approach.

And, again, because, we’re capitalizing on our opportunity, our first mover advantage in the trucking space, so it really is reinforcing our leadership position. When you think about what’s next for Aurora for 2025, and and 2025 is all about, unlocking our technology promise. And, we we’ve taken really a crawl, walk, run approach. So, obviously, we’ve launched, and we’re increasing our driverless miles every day. There’s a couple of things that we really want to accomplish to really deliver that technology promise that supports, adoption going into ’26 and ’27.

The first of those was to be able to operate at nighttime. We actually did that in advance of what we had expected, and we announced at the end of ours at our second quarter business review that we were operating at nighttime as well. So now we’ve gone from just daytime to day and night in climate, conditions. We will be focusing on unlocking the ability to operate at rain and heavy wind. We do that really well today, with supervised vehicle operators, and we expect to be able to operate that driverless by end of the year.

And then we will also start to expand and operate on additional lanes, really going from Fort Worth to El Paso to Phoenix, and that’s really, unlocking a tremendous amount of value for our customers. You know, one such example and and and this is an important how we think about, the market. But if you think about, like, the Aurora driver and the value that we’re trying to unlock, There’s there’s tremendous opportunity. Here’s an example with carriers where we focus not just on the cost side. A lot of people talk about the cost side and can you make a higher margin, but it’s also on the revenue side.

So we’re increasing the utilization of, the trucks that operate daily and delivering lower cost. In this particular, example, the ability to drive a thousand miles between Fort Worth and Phoenix, would take, multiple days in the traditional, market approach today. For us, we can drive it in one single, trip. We’re able to actually substantially increase both the revenue of the, the truck on a weekly basis as well as reducing the cost. So we think it’s a win win, on both sides, of the p and l.

And then, finally, one of the things we’re really proud of, and and this kinda kinda emphasizes the fact that we are very much, what I would say is kind of the standard bearer in terms of transparency to the market, versus maybe other AV people. We’ve just launched, what we call Aurora driver live, which you if you go to our YouTube channel at Aurora driver, you can check-in on our trucks operating daily, on the routes and just see what the world, the world can see what we see every day, which is the trucks handling all kinds of different conditions, flawlessly. So we’re really excited about this. It’s a first of its kind, and I think it just continues to emphasize our our safety and transparent approach to development. Alright.

With that, maybe I’ll just stop my presentation, and, we can get into the q and a, Colin.

Colin Rusch, Lead, Sustainable Growth and Resource Optimization Practice, Oppenheimer: Perfect. You know, and, David, thanks for the overview. Know, I would love to just kinda take a step back from a history perspective and get your your perspective on how all the critical technology elements came together at at Aurora. You know, there was an awful lot of investment, you know, in the industry starting in 2016, and and you guys were able to aggregate, a number of different elements into the platform. And we’d love to get your sense on, you know, on how those things came together and what the the critical technology pieces are.

David Maday, CFO, Aurora Innovations: Yeah. I I think, that’s a big question. I might be here for a while, but let me let me try

Colin Rusch, Lead, Sustainable Growth and Resource Optimization Practice, Oppenheimer: this one.

David Maday, CFO, Aurora Innovations: Look. We we had a we had an advantage when when Aurora was founded in in 2017 because we were we were cofounded by three really stellar people. Chris Ermson, who built Google’s initial self driving unit, which is now called Waymo, Sterling Anderson, who led Tesla’s autopilot, and Drew who was the former head of perception at Uber’s ATG unit. Right? And we ended up actually acquiring ATG, in 2020.

But, like, if you think about it, we have three founders with over fifty years of experience. They built the best team around them. And what they were able to understand is, you know, both by leveraging the hindsight and the foresight, they were able to really start from the beginning and and and design a system that maximizes the benefits of the passwordings while using all the cutting edge technology and advancements in AI and machine learning. Right? We’ve been talking about machine learning and AI for multiple years.

We’ve been using transformers for a long time. But, like, if I think about and summarize, like, some of the some of the things that are really great, one of them is our software. It is kind of our secret sauce. It’s a compound AI system. We refer to this as verifiable AI.

So what does verifiable AI do? It it leverages really two things. Really advancements in, the AI technology out there, transfer normal style models and and and deep learning that you can you can grab data and you and you can make the system better. But what it does do is it also avoids the risk associated with this pure end to end AI approach. You know, eliminate some things like hallucinations as well as regulatory hurdles.

Right? You know, black box models aren’t super popular with AI folks when you’re trying to describe how safe you think a product is. On the hardware side, you know, we like to purchase off the shelf technology where possible, But I also think it’s an important distinguisher that we have a lot of hardware capabilities and experience inside, and it’s super important when you’re driving a tractor trailer, an 80,000 pound tractor trailer down the road. You need to be able to see far enough along. There was no technology available when we went into trucking or even when we were first founded, to be able to go into trucking with the existing off the shelf LIDAR.

And then we acquired a company called Blackmore. They provided us our first light LIDAR, which is our proprietary LIDAR solution. This is this frequency modulated continuous wave technology. What does it do from, like, a, like, a from a layman’s terms? It gives us about an extra 9¢ of decision making time when we’re driving our vehicles as composed as compared to, like, traditional LiDARs.

Right? And so it also has the ability to, you know, look at and see traffic, which way it’s, headed or whether or whether it’s stationary. It allows us to reduce or basic, or actually eliminate any interference from sunlights or other sensors. So it’s a really important technology enabler, and that’s what allowed us to get into trucking. Right?

And then we’ve made foundational investments in our approach for, for simulation. And we kinda knew a long time ago that simulation was gonna be necessary to really advance the development of the technology. And, I think this became more evident to everybody after COVID, but but we were kinda doing it and leaning into it from the beginning. So I might say those are three, good examples, of where we’ve made investments.

Colin Rusch, Lead, Sustainable Growth and Resource Optimization Practice, Oppenheimer: I mean, that that that’s, you know, hugely helpful for us. And just for everyone, just to put it in in three simple terms, it’s the software embedded in this compound AI structure, the FMCW technology that gives you better visibility down the road, which is proprietary, and then the simulation technology, which allows you to verify, in rapid cycles, before you put trucks on the road into difficult environments to the incremental functionality. And I think for me, you know, developing a thesis around you guys and and rolling out coverage here, seeing the maturity of each of those elements, you know, come together, it’s been the part that gives us a lot of confidence that you guys are not only here first, but you’re here better than your peers, if if we can say it that way. So, you know, can you speak to how the company came to target commercial trucking and that opportunity set? Because I think it’s sometimes not seen as as glamorous as some of the passenger vehicle, but it’s certainly a bigger, more defensible opportunity in our view.

And how how you guys really built a defensible model in that sector?

David Maday, CFO, Aurora Innovations: Thanks thanks for the summary too and feedback. I I think you really understand the market well and the opportunities. I yeah. When I think about trucking, and and I’ve in full disclosure, it’s one of the reasons I came to Aurora was their focus in on trucking. When I think about trucking, there’s a couple of things.

But first, just Aurora, when it was founded, and its mission is to deliver the benefits of self driving technology safely, quickly, broadly in all markets. And they couldn’t even go into trucking until they knew they were gonna be safe, which was the whole point of the, the Blackmore acquisition in in in our first lane LiDAR. But when I look at the trucking market, I get really excited. Number one, it’s a massive market. It’s a trillion dollar market.

It dwarfs the current ride hailing market. There is no projections that you need to make to know trucking’s great. And, also, there’s tremendous need. Right? It let’s let’s be honest.

This is an aging workforce. It’s got persistent driver shortages. It’s got hours of service limitations, and all these things are expected. The trucking workforce and the the driver shortage, that those are expected to continue to, to grow. And, really, like, our focus is really on we are going to provide a solution that addresses pain points in the market, you know, another one being insurance costs, right, which continue to skyrocket as well as the number of nuclear verdicts.

But we’re gonna offer a viable solution that can really double the utilization, of the existing market at lower cost, and there’s no requirement for changes in in, like, the customer behavior. And and for me, like, if I if I juxtapose that with robotaxis and I think robo taxis is a great market, and it it’s interesting, but it’s not the market to lead in in my opinion. Right? Like, the unit economics and trucking are way more attractive. So if you think about a US truck driver, they make three times as much as a as a gig economy ride hailed driver.

Right? That gives you a tremendous pricing opportunity. And, again, the market’s already there. You don’t need to grow the market. And a lot of the reasons and and and the ways that you grow a market is by down costs.

Well, you can’t drive down costs till you scale a business. Right? And the ability to actually deploy in the trucking market doesn’t force us to drive down costs immediately to force adoption. And so for us, we’re able to grow and scale a business and then get the economies of sale on our hardware kits and everything else that we invest in, and then a natural extension of that could be in the ride hailing market. So for us, we think it’s the right, business model approach.

Colin Rusch, Lead, Sustainable Growth and Resource Optimization Practice, Oppenheimer: And awesome to to just articulate how big that that margin opportunity is for you guys, and and what a, you know, friendly market environment that you’re selling into. So I guess that dovetails into my next question around how the opportunity set has changed in the last few years, and how do you see it shifting in the the next, you know, call it five years and beyond as we see that driver, pool get older, and you start to see the endurance of the the vehicles get better. Right? And it’s it’s just as simple as that. So how are you guys, you know, seeing some of those shifts start, in the in the recent years, and how do see them accelerating over the next five to seven years?

David Maday, CFO, Aurora Innovations: Yeah. It’s a good question. You know, so look. Any new innovative technology that’s gonna really help revolutionize an industry, which has been around for a long time and has really it’s a it’s a tremendous industry. I give a lot of respect for all the people in this industry.

And sometimes you reach a point where you’re not able to continue to make the the improvements you wanna make without some sort of innovation boost, and that’s what I think this is. For me, the last couple of years has just proven that the opportunity is pretty clear and, even more compelling for us. And so when I think about it, it’s this continuing to focus on the value drivers in the near term. And the one thing that we did, and I mentioned it a little bit, in my intro, is one of the things that you have to do is you have to be able to operate in enough conditions to support adoption. Right?

So you can’t just launch in one thing and say you’re gonna go everywhere. You need to be a reliable supplement to the existing business. And to be reliable, you you have to operate in all the same conditions. You have to eliminate any friction that’s out there. So for us, our focus has been on be reliable, reduce friction, create value, and then provide, you know, an ins an incentive.

And in this case, the incentive is that you can double the utilization and lower your total cost of ownership. So we think that’s been a big focus. And I think over the next five years, honestly, we expect our technology to become a central part of the industry. Right? And it’s broadly deployed throughout The US.

I think at that point, then we look. If I look beyond 2030, let’s say, the opportunities, are endless. I think we can it’s it’s all gonna be focused on our mission. And, again, we can go into new industries or or use cases like ride hailing. We can go into different geographic areas, etcetera.

I think we’re just gonna continue to build upon that. So for us, right now, our focus is execution. Excellent.

Colin Rusch, Lead, Sustainable Growth and Resource Optimization Practice, Oppenheimer: You know? And and just shifting gears into, you know, market creation here in a little bit more detail. You know, we’ve seen emerging technology markets evolve, and you you mentioned this around cost reduction driving, you know, adoption in other markets. But I wanna get your sense on the competitive landscape. Right?

I mean, so sometimes technology, one of the essential things is just getting folks comfortable with this, and and you go through a period of coopetition. So how do you think about the competitive landscape and the coopetition required in terms of educating customers on how technology works and getting comfort you know, getting them comfortable that they have multiples, technology partners they could work with so that they can invest in, in the trends?

David Maday, CFO, Aurora Innovations: Yeah. Well, I think, it’s important in like, when Aurora first started out and and went into trucking, we learned early on, and and we’ve never really deviated from this. This concept of trying to get exclusivity everywhere to corner the market and block everybody out is kind of

Colin Rusch, Lead, Sustainable Growth and Resource Optimization Practice, Oppenheimer: a a

David Maday, CFO, Aurora Innovations: failed approach. Right? Like, we don’t expect that, and our customers don’t necessarily want that. Like, a FedEx would like to buy a truck from whoever they wanna buy They would like to get an AV system from whoever they like to do it.

So ours has always been focused on creating value and kind of being the industry standard bearer when it comes to AV trucking, and and that’s really how we’ve tried to separate ourselves. I And actually think we’ve got a, like, a multiyear structural lead. But but that was always foundationally started on, like, we were we were realistic on, the the growth and when we would you know, when what what growth would look like, when we would come into the market. We’ve been the most transparent company in the in the AV industry, both, you know, from a regulator and and and from a from a commercial side, but just in everything we approach, every one of our customers and and you can you can talk to all of them. They they kind of we’re the reference.

We’re kind of the standard bearer when it comes to understanding their business, trying to integrate within their business, and we’ve never ever tried to block anybody out. We’re we’re just gonna create value, and and I think that’s where we get to, creating a really strong position. Like, we have a multiyear lead too. Right? We’re the only company that operates driverless today on The US public roads for trucking.

We’ve got strategic partnerships. And one of the things that’s really important people don’t probably give enough emphasis to is, you know, the goal isn’t to be in one market or in one lane saying you’re driverless. Like, the goal is to actually be an integral or an essential part of our customer’s business. And to be able to do that, you have to be able to build at scale. You have to be thinking about the future.

And for us, I think that’s something that we’ve really done well. Same time, it’s a trillion dollar market, so it’s not a winner take all. It’s a large enough for plenty of other players. And and, again, I think, bringing in new technologies, particularly safety critical, it requires a lot of both cooperation and collaboration. And there’s areas where you shouldn’t be competing against other AV players.

You should be forming a strong coalition, whether it be a via, which is one of the the AV’s trade industries or, you know, the support in California. There’s certain elements where you should be advancing the industry generally, and then you should create your value, and that should be how you distinguish yourself in the competitive market.

Colin Rusch, Lead, Sustainable Growth and Resource Optimization Practice, Oppenheimer: So what I guess a a follow-up to that is, you know, where do you see the real technology differentiation versus peers? I mean, I I think this ecosystem approach, the ability to scale seem to to resonate. But how do you guys think about that internally, and and how should investors think about the the technology differentiation?

David Maday, CFO, Aurora Innovations: Yeah. I I think for some folks, really it’s hard to understand the differences because there’s a lot of stuff that’s out there and people claim a lot of things. I I like to say and I don’t have a ton of visibility into all of our technological approaches. I I kinda say this. We’re the only trucking driverless company out there in public roads that speaks volumes.

We’ve we’re the most transparent. We tell everybody how we’re gonna operate, what we’re gonna do, and then we deliver upon it. And I think, you know, our verifiable AI approach is the right approach, from a regulatory, from a, you know, from a safety perspective. I think people say other things because it sounds good or they’re trying to capitalize on something else, but I don’t think they really recognize the value of what we’re trying to do in the safety critical industry. But I also think our validation approach is and it’s unsexy.

Right? But it’s super, important for us. And so, look, it took us a long time to launch our first driverless product at in the daytime, and we were able to launch it nighttime, you know, a quarter later. Right? Like, that’s a really monumental step in terms of investments we made in the validation and our approach.

And I and I think, you know, that really sets us apart in some ways. So we’ll continue to see how it plays out. But if we deliver to our road map, I I think it’s gonna be pretty clear what the differentiation is.

Colin Rusch, Lead, Sustainable Growth and Resource Optimization Practice, Oppenheimer: Let’s let’s pick up on that because I I think that was one thing that, we were kinda joking about after the call is, like, we haven’t seen a autonomous company pull forward, time frames, before. And so, you know, the fact that you guys, you know, rolled out nighttime driving as quickly as you did was was pretty meaningful for us. Can you talk about those learning cycles and kind of the accelerated piece of this? Because it’s not just validation, but it’s understanding what the the problems are as you move into the simulation platform, and really leverage that. So can you talk about the learning cycles and, Aurora’s approach to training systems and adding incremental functionality?

David Maday, CFO, Aurora Innovations: Yeah. Well, I probably

Colin Rusch, Lead, Sustainable Growth and Resource Optimization Practice, Oppenheimer: advantages are. Yeah. I I I know you’re the finance guy, but, you know, we’d love to just take take advantage of your your insight that you have to offer here.

David Maday, CFO, Aurora Innovations: Yeah. I I made that, I made that do it as well, but I’ll try to embrace my inner Chris here for half a second. But Yeah. Think the most important thing is to recognize that when you develop a product and and this is the the benefit of trucking. In trucking, there’s a lot of self similarity, and and this is one of the things we’ve been saying for quite some time, and we’re gonna prove out here over the next couple of quarters.

We’ve been operating in all weather conditions for quite some time and testing and developing on all weather conditions. So it wasn’t like we just did our development testing on on daytime and then shifted over to night or shifted over rain. Like, honestly, to a layperson, you could be in our truck and see it operate in rain and be like, why aren’t you operating driverless? It’s it’s flawless. And and so I think our approach is first off, we’ve always been operating in these environments for a long time, so we’ve got a lot of learnings.

And in our systematic approach on how we do things foundationally set up by the safety case, and then how we think about our our development testing approach where you’ve got, like, three phases. You got the phase where we see every day, you know that the system’s gonna work great. You’ve got some, instances where you don’t see it all that often, so you need to use simulation to amplify it. And then the third folks, third approach is where you really may not see it on the roads and you need to use, like, Nitza’s crash taxonomy and build simulations and tools around that. That approach applies to all of these scenarios.

And and what it allows us to do, it gives us a really super easy framework. I shouldn’t say easy because it’s hard. But it’s a super concise framework for how we do development. And so for us, we’re just leveraging the investments we put in place upfront for how we develop a product. And I think that’s what I could say is the most important thing.

I’m sure Chris will give a way better explanation than that.

Colin Rusch, Lead, Sustainable Growth and Resource Optimization Practice, Oppenheimer: No. I mean but I think it’s it’s a it’s important to understand from a practical perspective. You know? At at what point do you guys get comfortable with taking the safety driver out? Right?

And so thinking about kind of this multilayered approach to how you’re getting incremental data and getting to a place where you’re like, okay. It’s okay to just take the driver out. And part of what you’re saying, I think, is you’re running it with with that backup system in place for a period of time. And so, I guess, can you talk about, you know, when you make that decision? Right?

I mean, if if you’ve got this kind of multipronged approach to understanding how to operate in an environment to get, go through those learning cycles, At what point do take the driver out and just let it run? Right? How do you what do you guys need to see, to, to get comfortable with that? I think a lot of investors are looking at, you know, mean time between failure as well as number of miles driven, but curious what do you guys think about and talk about internally.

David Maday, CFO, Aurora Innovations: Yeah. I I think this is probably one of the bigger misconceptions out there, and it’s probably facilitated by some AV companies that maybe haven’t succeeded. Like, you know, if you think during development, people were talking about what what are the number of disengagements? Disengagements are horrible metric to talk about how safe or not safe we are because that’s how we learn and develop the system. And so for us, disengagements aren’t a super meaningful metric.

We have put some metrics out there before in terms of development that we thought were important. But foundationally, it’s really simple. It’s the closure of our safety case. Our safe free our safety case is a comprehensive evaluation for a safety critical product. It’s used by all kinds of safety critical industries.

You start to see a lot of AV companies try to, or replicate some element of our safety case framework, and I think that’s how we make all the decisions if it’s gonna be acceptably safe. Now the interesting part behind it is the safety case is really foundationally, there’s a there’s 460 claims, But it’s not really the magnitude of the claims, which is the issue. It’s the evidence in the testing that’s used to support it. So think about for us, when we launched in daytime, we had over 10,000 requirements that we needed the truck to be able to do, and we had to pass over 2,700,000 tests. And those tests aren’t like, there’s no random number that, like, somebody gives you and says, hey.

You have to pass all these tests. It’s not there. It’s developed, and those tests are developed based on what we think we need to be acceptably safe. And so you build these claims, and then you start to deviate it. We we have a much higher bar for safety than what anybody could mandate, and that’s why you don’t see a federal mandate right now, like, in terms of safety.

It’s like because it’s hard to do, and and we think we are kind of the standard bearer in terms of the safety. So for us, it’s all about do we think it’s, do we think it’s gonna be acceptably safe? And we’ve got and we have to have the evidence to to support it. And, you know, example would be, like, you know, and, I think Chris mentioned this on the earnings call, but just, you know, when you think about nighttime, what was one of the challenges of nighttime? Well, it’s finding a person lying on the ground underneath a car at nighttime.

Like, that’s what we would call vulnerable road user, but, like, are we able to acceptably identify, see, and be able to react to that sort of situation? And so for us, it’s just a lot of hard work in that area foundationally built on our approach to safety.

Colin Rusch, Lead, Sustainable Growth and Resource Optimization Practice, Oppenheimer: That is incredibly helpful. So I guess shifting to the scale up here. Right? I mean, as as we move into financials and and really building a business here, can you just talk about where your ecosystem is in terms of the ability to move into series production and start, you know, building these kits and then implementing them on on vehicles either from a aftermarket perspective or, you know, with the OEMs, you know, in an integrated way. You know, talk to us about, you know, where you’re at in terms of preparedness, you know, benchmarks that we should be thinking about over the next couple of years and as you start to see some volumes really start to to move here now that you’ve got trucks on the road?

David Maday, CFO, Aurora Innovations: Yep. So we have a so we have our launch fleet today. Right? Those those are the trucks we’re operating on today that we’ve referred to as the tens of trucks that we can operate in driverless. And I think that that is all the trucks that we kinda need to be able to to demonstrate the technology promise.

Right? So to be able to operate in all the different conditions and at multiple lanes. Once we’ve achieved all of those objectives in ’25, there’s a couple of things that are gonna happen. In ’26, we’re gonna introduce our second generation of hardware. This is a more reliable, robust, and higher volume hardware kit, that’s that will allow us to build hundreds to thousands of kits, which will allow us to then scale.

And and those kits are also designed to operate a million miles. Our current launch hardware kit doesn’t have that same robustness and the same capability. So one of the important things to unlock from a scaling perspective is that next generation kit. When that happens, we’re then able to put these kits, whether we put them on trucks that have been upfitted by ourselves or on the scalable platforms the OEMs are working on. It’s probably gonna be some combination of both, but, like, that that’s the that’s phase two.

So ’26 is about starting this customer adoption. And at the same time that we’re building truck volume and and kit volume in the second generation kit, we’re also going to expand and operate throughout all of the Sunbelt. Right? So that’s a really important step. This is necessary before we get to the third generation kit.

Because in the third generation kit, we intend to be able to build into the tens of thousands of kits and tens of thousands of trucks. What do you need for that to be successful? You need scalable platforms with line side integration with our OEM partners, to, to operate. And so that is what we’ve done. Is that’s that’s kind of our plan.

So it’s kind of like this stepped approach. Like, our first step is we’re doing the technology promise. Our second one is we’re gonna be able to operate throughout the Sunbelt and build more volume on our second generation kit all in advance of the third generation, which is really that that kick start into the scalability and line side install with our OEM partners. So that’s kind of the approach.

Colin Rusch, Lead, Sustainable Growth and Resource Optimization Practice, Oppenheimer: Excellent. And so how much cash do you need? You guys have been pretty forthright about, you know, keeping a healthy balance sheet and making sure that, yeah, cash is never a concern. You you mentioned it upfront, but, you know, can you just talk about the the philosophical approach to the balance sheet, as you scale, you know, pretty robust technology here and how you think about a minimum cash balance as a you know, in in your approach to bolstering the the balance sheet as you, you work through commercializing this technology?

David Maday, CFO, Aurora Innovations: Yeah. I I think there’s, I I think my approach, and well, our approach is is pretty simple. I think there’s two things. Number one, we never want our employees, our customers, our partners, or our investors to think or worry about liquidity. We don’t want it to be a concern.

We know that this is this is a this requires a lot of capital. It’s one of the hardest things that’s ever been done in this industry. Right? And it’s gonna take a a lot of resources. I actually think that there are competitors out there that try to claim they can do it way cheaper and they have way less OpEx, and and I actually think they’re kinda fooling themselves.

Right? Because there’s a difference between launching a driverless product and scaling to a driverless business. So, and I don’t think any customer or partner wants to know that you did something cheap on a safety critical product. Right? So I think there’s an important element of you shouldn’t be investing in the future.

At the same time for us, we ended, q two with 1.3 1,300,000,000.0 in liquidity. That we think will get us into the 2027. We had said before that we think, before last quarter, we wanted to raise, I don’t know, $6.58 50 to feel comfortable we were on our path to, get to positive free cash flow. So, you know, we’re you know, we still have some time to go on that, but, you know, we have, chosen a couple of different financing solutions in the past. Like, we’ve done a pipe.

We’ve done some secondaries. Most recently, we were able to use this at the market mechanism, which has been actually turned out to be pretty efficient and pretty effective, and we raised 331,000,000 last quarter through that. We’re gonna continue to explore all those options and continue to make sure that liquidity is really never a concern, as we develop our product.

Colin Rusch, Lead, Sustainable Growth and Resource Optimization Practice, Oppenheimer: That’s super helpful. And then I I guess the final question for me is just, you know, expectations around revenue growth. You know, you you guys have done a nice job in articulating the path to to profitability, the path to, you know, getting customers over the hump. You know, talk to talk to us about customer diversity, you know, how you think about getting the right set of customers without having too many customers, and then how you scale into, monetizing some of those relationships as the the technology matures and you start evolving the pricing model a little bit here.

David Maday, CFO, Aurora Innovations: Yeah. I I think for us, it has to start off with executing the crawl, walk, run approach for our commercialization plan. Today, we have driverless trucks operating, but we have to continue to prove the promise of the Aurora driver technology. And to do that, we have to continue to increase the value for our customers. So you have to be able to operate in the vast majority of the weather conditions that they would ever see and operate in just like they were driven by humans.

And and and in this particular case, like, the the Aurora driver and AV technology is going to supplement all of these customers’ networks. Right? And so this isn’t a replacement. This is a supplement. And you and to supplement, effectively, you’ve gotta be able to do the vast majority of things.

So at the beginning, we think it’s really important to do that. We’ve, we’re operating a a fleet of trucks, and so therefore, we provide what we call this transportation as a service business model. So we’re we’re pricing just like, you know, anybody, any carrier would be charging to carry goods between a and b. So it’s got not just the driver, but all the operating costs of the trucks, as well. We’re shifting to a driver as a service business model.

What we think is ’26 is gonna be a year where we’re really gonna start to focus in on revenue growth. ’25 is not a revenue growth year for us. ’25 is all about I mean, we will have revenue and we’ll continue to grow, but ’25 for us is all about the technology promise because we’re not increasing the fleet of vehicles from where we’re operating at today. ’26 will be increasing the fleet of vehicles, and you’ll start to see us focus in on revenue growth. What you’ll see is us lean in heavily to, you know, the earlier adopters of the customers, and we’ll continue to moderate and and iterate the business plan based on each of their needs.

Another important thing for us to do is to be able to drive to customer endpoints, and you’ll start to see us drive to customer endpoints starting in ’26. And that’s a really important enabler for for value creation and price protection. Right? So that’s that’s where our focus is. You know, we’ll we’ll provide more feedback for ’26, you know, later on at the end of the year when we think about ’26 guidance.

But for now, our focus is on executing, you know, the technology promise.

Colin Rusch, Lead, Sustainable Growth and Resource Optimization Practice, Oppenheimer: Excellent. Well, I think we’re running into time here. I wanna thank everybody for joining us. You know, just to to recap a little bit, you guys have developed this compound AI system, which is a combination of both hardware that’s proprietary coupled with, you know, innovative software system and simulation platform that’s allowed you to to go through accelerated learning cycles and demonstrate not only technology confidence, but also the safety to to start building trust with your customers. And we’re starting to hit a a point on inflection for revenue.

What else do you wanna leave investors with here as they think about Aurora and and think about the opportunity set in front of you?

David Maday, CFO, Aurora Innovations: Yeah. I I I think, you know, I think you did a great job of summarizing. We’re really excited at Aurora of the things that we’re accomplishing, and how we’re doing it. Right? Like like, we really do feel like we wanna be the standard bearer when it comes to safely deploying this technology responsibly in the trucking market and doing it in a way where we’re not chasing headlines.

We’re not chasing the hey. We’re gonna be here at x date, but really with the vision that we’re are gonna become an essential part of our customers’ business in the long term. And and it’s great. And I would also say that we wanna continue to be the most transparent in the world. So for those who have not seen, again, go out to, Aurora driver live.

If you go to YouTube channel, it’s at Aurora driver, and you can see our trucks operating on a daily basis, driverless. And I think that that’s that’s a really great proof point, just into the confidence of our technology and our approach.

Colin Rusch, Lead, Sustainable Growth and Resource Optimization Practice, Oppenheimer: David, thanks so much for the time and the wisdom, and we’ll look forward to talking with you soon. And if anyone wants to talk with us about Aurora, we’re happy to help, you know, educate you as well as we can before we pass you off to the company. Thanks so much, everybody. Have a great afternoon. Thanks, Colin.

Thanks.

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.