Aurora raises nearly $500 million more for self-driving technology efforts

Aurora Innovation raised $483 million in a secondary stock offering, providing crucial funding to continue its drive into autonomous freight and again demonstrating the large capital requirements of the self-driving technology industry.

"The opportunistic raise gives us runway well into 2026, putting us on the path to deploy driverless trucks at scale and become a cash flow positive company, which we expect in 2028," the company said in a statement.

The Pittsburgh company sold 134.2 million shares of Class A common stock at $3.60 per share on Aug. 2.

Other autonomous technology companies are also raising cash to sustain operations as they find that developing self-driving vehicles has become more expensive and taken longer than many expected.

Ford and Volkswagen shuttered Argo AI, their self-driving joint venture, in October 2022, after raising at least $3.6 billion in investments from the automakers and others. Hyundai's Motional delayed its commercialization plans this year. Zoox just passed its 10th birthday and has not yet launched a commercial service.

After pausing operations and losing critical operating permits following a crash last year that injured a pedestrian in San Francisco, General Motors' Cruise robotaxi subsidiary resumed autonomous testing with human safety drivers in May. It also received an $850 million cash injection from GM in May.

Alphabet Inc. said in July that it will make a $5 billion investment in its Waymo self-driving subsidiary over multiple years.

"This is consistent with enabling Waymo to build the world's leading self-driving technology," Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat said during the company's quarterly earnings call on July 23.

After starting out developing autonomous technology for light vehicles, Aurora has pivoted to self-driving trucks. Aurora CEO Chris Urmson was previously one of the leaders of Google's self-driving car project, now Waymo.

Volvo Trucks, one of its partners, has forecast an eventual $42 billion market for hauling freight autonomously across the southern tier of the U.S. Aurora provides the autonomous driving system for Volvo's VNL tractor.

"I envision a world where goods move safely 24/7/365 on driverless trucks," Urmson said in an Aug. 3 blog post discussing the secondary stock offering.

"Trucking is the backbone of the American economy but our supply chains are fragile and the number of people who want to drive trucks has not kept up with the demand to move goods," he said.

Trucking companies and industry associations have warned for years that a growing shortage of long-haul truckers will raise freight costs and hurt efficiency.

Aurora is operating autonomous trucks across multiple routes in Texas for customers that include FedEx and Uber Freight, and trucking companies that include Werner Enterprises, Schneider and Hirschbach. But those vehicles have human drivers acting as backups.

Urmson said Aurora will begin to convert some of those runs to fully driverless routes this year.

Although focused on trucking, Aurora is keeping one foot in the light-vehicle business.

It has a small fleet of Toyota Sienna minivans operating as robotaxis, but with safety drivers, in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The company has said its self-driving system can be used for both commercial and passenger vehicles.