Business Description

Our mission is to deliver the benefits of self-driving technology safely, quickly, and broadly. Aurora was founded in 2017 by Chris Urmson, Sterling Anderson, and Drew Bagnell, three of the most prominent leaders in the self-driving space. Led by a team with deep experience, including Chris and Drew, we have launched and are continuing to develop the Aurora Driver based on what we believe to be the most advanced and scalable suite of self-driving hardware, software, and data services in the world to fundamentally transform the global transportation market. The Aurora Driver is designed as a platform to adapt and interoperate amongst a multitude of vehicle types and applications. To date, we have successfully integrated the Aurora Driver into numerous different vehicle platforms designed to meet its requirements: from passenger vehicles to light commercial vehicles to Class 8 trucks. By creating a common driver platform for multiple vehicle types and use cases, the capabilities we develop in one market reinforce and strengthen our competitive advantages in other areas. For example, highway driving capabilities developed for trucking will carry over to highway segments driven by passenger vehicles in ride hailing applications. We believe this is the right approach to bring self-driving to market and will enable us to target and transform multiple massive markets, including trucking, passenger mobility, and local goods delivery. Beyond the economic opportunity, we believe we have a unique opportunity to have a material positive impact on the lives of millions of people, while also improving business productivity. First and foremost, we are focused on the opportunity to greatly improve road safety. In trucking, we can enable logistics networks to move goods more efficiently, and also help fill the shortage of truck drivers by providing a self-driving option. We can expand access to transportation, improving the lives of the millions of people with a disability in the U.S. who have difficulty traveling outside of the home. And we will give people back their time that can be made more productive and enjoyable. We launched trucking as our first driverless product, as we believe its massive scale, significant structural need, attractive unit economics, and self-similar operating environment will allow us to rapidly deploy and profitably scale on high-volume, highway-focused routes. Drafting on the revenue and technical capability we expect this trucking product to generate, we plan to leverage the extensibility of the Aurora Driver to deploy and scale into the passenger mobility and local goods delivery markets. We have operated our self-driving test vehicles in diverse weather and operating environments, including in Arizona, California, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Texas, allowing us to create a more robust self-driving system. Our first-principles approach underpins our technology development strategy for the Aurora Driver. We made foundational investments early on, based on our prior experience in the self-driving industry, that allow us to accelerate development and position our platform for long-term scalability. Some of these foundational investments include developing the Aurora Driver with what we believe to be the optimal combination of artificial intelligence and machine-learning with rule-based approaches. We have used a “Verifiable AI” approach, intended to leverage advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning to deliver a practical, verifiable, and commercially scalable solution. We have also built a proprietary Virtual Testing Suite, which makes our development more efficient and faster than traditional approaches that rely heavily on on-road vehicle fleets. While many companies in the self-driving industry tout miles driven as a metric, our Virtual Testing Suite allows us to iterate faster and more efficiently, while reducing our reliance on on-road testing. We have also invested in our next-generation sensing suite, which combines the best of camera, radar, and lidar. This includes developing our Aurora FirstLight Lidar, which uses proprietary frequency modulated continuous wave (“FMCW”) technology that enables long-range sensing, and simultaneous detection of both the position and velocity of objects.…