Aurora AUR Q4 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

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Date

Wednesday, Feb. 11, 2026 at 5:00 p.m. ET

Call participants

• Chief Executive Officer — Christopher Urmson
• Chief Financial Officer — David Maday
• Head of Investor Relations — Stacy Feit

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Takeaways

• Revenue -- $1,000,000 in the fourth quarter, representing a 25% sequential increase from the third quarter, with $3,000,000 recognized for fiscal 2025 and $4,000,000 including pre-commercial pilot revenue.
• Operating loss -- $238,000,000 in the fourth quarter, including $48,000,000 of stock-based compensation.
• Research & development -- R&D expense totaled $155,000,000 for the quarter.
• SG&A -- Selling, general, and administrative expense was $30,000,000 in the quarter.
• Cost of revenue -- $6,000,000 incurred in the fourth quarter.
• Cash usage -- Operating cash utilized was $146,000,000 for the quarter and $581,000,000 for fiscal 2025; capital expenditures were $8,000,000 and $31,000,000, respectively.
• Liquidity -- Year-end liquidity position nearly $1,500,000,000 in cash and investments.
• Revenue guidance -- 2026 revenue expected to reach $14,000,000-$16,000,000, reflecting a 400% increase at the midpoint; "Revenue will be back-end loaded, with the fourth quarter projected to contribute over half of full-year revenue."
• Truck fleet scaling -- More than 200 no-observer driverless trucks projected to be operational exiting 2026, launching in the second quarter, with full-rate production of 20 trucks per week in the third quarter.
• Run-rate revenue -- Approximately $80,000,000 Transportation-as-a-Service run-rate cited for year-end truck fleet size.
• Gross margin target -- "Breakeven gross margin on a run-rate basis exiting 2026" targeted with cost reductions and second-generation hardware.
• Hardware cost reduction -- Second-generation commercial kit expected to deliver a 50%+ reduction in hardware costs.
• 2026 cash burn outlook -- Average quarterly cash use estimated at $190,000,000-$220,000,000.
• Free cash flow outlook -- Management remains "confident" in achieving positive free cash flow in 2028 with current liquidity.
• Operational milestones -- Aurora Driver surpassed 250,000 cumulative driverless miles in January, nearly triple early-October figures; opened seven new driverless lanes, expanding addressable market to over 3.6 billion vehicle miles.
• Safety performance -- Management cited "100% on-time performance and a perfect driverless safety record with zero Aurora Driver-attributed collisions."
• Technology advancements -- Aurora Driver now operates driverlessly in rain, fog, and heavy wind; inclement weather impacted Texas operations roughly 40% of the time in fiscal 2025 before recent releases.
• Mapping automation -- Aurora Atlas high-definition map content creation now largely automated, "drastically" speeding expansion of operational domains.
• Commercial momentum -- All 2026 truck capacity is fully committed; contracts for the fourth quarter will be finalized post year-end truck supply confirmation.
• Customer pipeline -- A "pipeline of thousands of trucks" for the Driver-as-a-Service model is cited, based on active customer interest and committed agreements.
• Industrial partnerships -- Partnerships with Volvo and PACCAR are in progress; Volvo VNL autonomous trucks have exited the pilot line and line-side integration is a milestone for commercial scale manufacturing.
• New programs -- International LT-based fleet with second-generation hardware targeted for deployment in 2026 without partner-requested observers.
• Third-generation hardware -- Joint development with Aeva MoVeo targets supply for tens of thousands of trucks, with start of production in 2027.
• ATM program -- $15,000,000 in net proceeds were used for fiscal 2025 RSU tax liabilities; continued ATM usage planned for RSU taxes and bonuses through 2027.

Summary

Aurora Innovation (NASDAQ:AUR) delivered notable sequential and annual commercial revenue growth and reported major operational milestones, including surpassing 250,000 driverless miles and expanding driverless lane coverage. Management disclosed 2026 guidance for a more than 400% revenue increase, a fully committed truck fleet, and a significant scaling plan with over 200 no-observer driverless trucks operational by year-end. Substantial reductions in hardware costs, aggressive cash management, and a strengthened liquidity position were highlighted as enablers for a run-rate breakeven gross margin by the close of 2026 and positive free cash flow in 2028. The company reinforced its leadership in safety and automation, highlighted further expansion of operational domains, and detailed robust customer demand with long-term contracted commitments.

• Management emphasized the transition to a Driver-as-a-Service model, noting a contractual pipeline in the thousands and expected material expansion of key customer relationships, such as Detmar Logistics, from 2027 forward.
• Advancements in automation of Aurora Atlas mapping, enabled by verifiable AI and cloud-based algorithms, were positioned as critical to accelerated market expansion and scalability.
• The forthcoming launch of the International LT fleet and progress on Volvo VNL line-side integration demonstrate increased confidence in the multi-OEM truck supply strategy.
• OEM partners’ adoption curves and fleet integration timelines differ, as second-generation International trucks run fully validated, non-prototype redundant parts, while PACCAR and Volvo follow nuanced validation pathways.
• Weather-related operational constraints, such as those from Texas storms, were addressed as limiting factors for driverless deployment in specific environments, with safety operators retained when outside prescribed operational scope.

Industry glossary

• Aurora Atlas: The company’s proprietary high-definition map system that enhances route safety and computational efficiency for autonomous trucks by providing detailed, continuously updated semantic road content.
• Driver-as-a-Service (DAS): Aurora's planned commercial model where customers purchase driverless truck capability as a service, rather than as a product or asset, enabling scalable freight operations.
• Transportation-as-a-Service (TaaS): Interim business model in which Aurora owns and operates the autonomous truck fleet to deliver customer freight, ahead of DAS implementation.
• Line-side integration: Assembly process where autonomy hardware is installed in trucks directly on the OEM’s production line, supporting scalable manufacturing.
• FirstLight LiDAR: Aurora’s proprietary light detection and ranging sensor technology designed for adaptive, cost-effective autonomous vehicle perception.
• Rausch: A company engaged by Aurora for fleet upfitting and production scaling to support deployment of autonomous trucks.
• Aeva MoVeo: Aurora’s hardware partner responsible for the third-generation autonomous vehicle hardware kit and related industrialized safety systems.
• ATMs: At-the-market equity offering programs, used to raise capital flexibly by issuing stock directly into the public markets at prevailing prices.

Full Conference Call Transcript

Stacy Feit: Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our fourth quarter 2025 business review call. We announced our results earlier this afternoon. Our shareholder letter and a presentation to accompany this call are available on our Investor Relations website at ir.aurora.tech. The shareholder letter was also furnished with our Form 8-K filed today with the SEC. On the call with me today are Christopher Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO, and David Maday, CFO. Chris will provide an update on the progress we have made across the key pillars of our business and David will recap our fourth quarter financial results. We will then open the call to Q&A.

A recording of this conference call will be available on our Investor Relations website at ir.aurora.tech shortly after this call has ended. I would like to take this opportunity to remind you that during the call, we will be making forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed, projected, or implied during this call, in particular, those described in our risk factors, included in our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended 12/31/2024, and other documents filed with the SEC, as well as the current uncertainty and unpredictability in our business, markets, and economy.

Additional information will also be set forth in our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended 12/31/2025. You should not rely on our forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. All forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on assumptions and beliefs as of the date hereof, and Aurora Innovation, Inc. disclaims any obligation to update any forward-looking statements except as required by law. Our discussion today may include non-GAAP financial measures. These non-GAAP measures should be considered in addition to and not as a substitute for or in isolation from our GAAP results.

Information regarding our non-GAAP financial results, including a reconciliation of our historical GAAP to non-GAAP results, can be found in our shareholder letter, which was furnished with our Form 8-K filed today with the SEC and may also be found on our Investor Relations website. Our discussion today may also include reference to forward-looking free cash flow, a non-GAAP financial measure. To the extent that this forward-looking financial measure is provided, it is presented on a non-GAAP basis without a reconciliation due to the inherent difficulty in forecasting and quantifying certain amounts that are necessary for such reconciliation. With that, I will now turn the call over to Christopher Urmson.

Christopher Urmson: Thank you, Stacy. 2025 was a defining year for Aurora Innovation, Inc. and the future of logistics, marked by our launch of the first driverless commercial trucking operations on U.S. public roads. In just a few quarters, we proved the promise of our technology and further extended our first-mover advantage. What began as steady progress has accelerated into compelling growth. In January, the Aurora Driver passed 250,000 driverless miles, nearly triple the cumulative miles achieved through early October. We have expanded the driverless capabilities and will nearly triple our current addressable market to over 3.6 billion vehicle miles traveled with the opening of seven additional driverless lanes.

Crucially, we achieved this acceleration while maintaining 100% on-time performance and a perfect driverless safety record with zero Aurora Driver-attributed collisions. The Aurora Driver is now capable of driverless operations in inclement weather including rain, fog, and heavy wind. We also started supervised autonomous freight delivery to support multiple customer sites. With our latest software release, we believe the Aurora Driver is now sufficiently generalized for us to begin expanding across the Sunbelt in 2026. The launch of our second-generation hardware kit on a new fleet of trucks expected in the next few months will enable driverless operations without a partner-requested observer.

This new fleet will support our objective to exit 2026 with more than 200 driverless trucks in operation as we prepare for industrialized scaling in 2027 and beyond.

David Maday: We expect this expansion to drive a multifold increase in revenue in 2026, with an exit rate that will generate significant financial momentum heading into 2027. We are seizing the opportunity to fundamentally improve safety and restructure the economics of one of the most critical industries in the world. We see a near future in which tens of thousands of Aurora Driver-powered trucks deliver freight across the U.S. and ultimately globally. With our latest software release, we unlocked a critical expansion of our operating domain with the validation of driverless operations in multiple forms of inclement weather, including rain, fog, and heavy wind.

During 2025, inclement weather of all types constrained our Driver’s operations in Texas roughly 40% of the time.

Christopher Urmson: We

David Maday: Our latest software release drives a step change in potential availability and utilization across the Sunbelt, a core component of our value proposition. As planned, our latest software release also expands driverless operations to multiple lanes, including El Paso to Fort Worth, and bidirectional travel between El Paso and Phoenix. The resulting 1,000-mile multistate lane between Fort Worth and Phoenix far exceeds hours-of-service limitations for a traditional driver, thereby enabling superhuman asset utilization for our customers. With the additional driverless capabilities unlocked in our latest software release, we believe the Aurora Driver is now sufficiently generalized for us to begin expanding across the Sunbelt in 2026, aligned with customer demand. This is a massive growth lever for Aurora Innovation, Inc.

We leveraged this generalized ability to launch supervised autonomy operations this month on the bidirectional lanes between Dallas and Laredo and are targeting driverless validation this quarter. This 400-plus mile route expands the Aurora Driver’s operational domain through the San Antonio, Austin, and Waco metros. This route is the nation’s largest international trade gateway, a critical freight artery between the U.S. and Mexico. Executing this expansion near simultaneously with Phoenix demonstrates our ability to rapidly open new lanes. This validates our core thesis that the Aurora Driver can scale rapidly. Lane expansion requires two core components.

First, the driving skills to operate safely in an expanding operating domain, and second, the mapping necessary to traverse the U.S. highway system and the surface streets to reach customers’ facilities. The Aurora Driver now has generalizable skills. And we have made meaningful progress automating the creation of new content for the Aurora Atlas, our proprietary high-definition map technology that enhances the safety and computational efficiency of the Aurora Driver. By leveraging our verifiable AI systems, our cloud-based algorithms are able to generate semantic components of the Aurora Atlas from collected data, automatically building portions of the map with little or no human assistance.

This drastically accelerates the production of Atlas content and we expect the pace of map expansion to continue to increase as we further optimize automation in our cloud mapping software. This mapping improvement enables us to efficiently support driverless deployment directly between customer endpoints at scale. And we have now begun supervised autonomous operations to support multiple customer facilities. Starting with Hirschbach, we are setting up endpoint operations in Laredo to support Driscoll’s. We are also running along I-20 for Detmar, between their facility in Midland, Texas and Capital Sands mining sites, as well as for one of the leading carriers in the U.S. from their Phoenix facility.

With all of its capabilities, the Aurora Driver offers an unmatched value proposition. It can navigate the complexities of diverse road types, maintaining 24/7 operating schedules while providing endurance far beyond hours-of-service limits, and deliver directly to customer endpoints. Our execution in 2026 will further reinforce this leadership position while showcasing the Aurora Driver’s inherent scalability to support the transition to a Driver-as-a-Service business model. We have already committed our capacity through 2026 and we will finalize contracts for the fourth quarter once we confirm our year-end truck supply.

As we turn to Driver-as-a-Service in 2027 and beyond, customer interest already supports a pipeline of thousands of trucks, continuing to expand with our current travelers customers and recently announced a new opportunistic agreement with Detmar Logistics, a leading provider of dry bulk and frac sand solutions. Detmar selected Aurora to support the growth of their business given we are the only company with driverless Class A commercial trucking operations on public highways and roads in the U.S. This customer agreement demonstrates the flexibility of the Aurora Driver to deliver value in a multitude of use cases, enabling us to meet customers where they are to support their growth and efficiency.

In 2026, Aurora Driver-powered trucks will continuously haul sand for over 20 hours a day across a 60-mile route with 80% of the miles on I-20. This will enable Detmar to achieve nearly 24/7 superhuman asset utilization and effectively double their capacity to move sand for one of the world’s largest multinational oil and gas companies. Supervised autonomous operations have begun and hoster Detmar will transition to driverless as we deploy our second fleet of driverless trucks expected in 2026. With a successful deployment, we expect this customer relationship to meaningfully expand in 2027 and beyond with the transition to our DAS model.

Stacy Feit: Our vehicle

David Maday: technology enables a multi-OEM strategy to provide truck supply for our growing customer base. This approach is anchored in our foundational partnerships with Volvo and PACCAR. Our partnership with Volvo recently entered the industrialization phase. The first group of Volvo VNL autonomous trucks equipped with the Aurora Driver have come up the pilot line at their New River Valley, Virginia manufacturing facility, following line-side integration of our second-generation commercial hardware kits. This milestone establishes the manufacturing foundation necessary to produce autonomous trucks at large commercial scale.

Take a look at the video on Page 13 of our presentation to learn more about the work the Aurora and Volvo teams are doing together, as well as to get a firsthand look at this line-side integration in action. Once Volvo completes validation of the vehicle-level firmware necessary for driverless operations, we will integrate these trucks into our driverless fleet. We are also advancing our new program based on the International LT truck. These trucks, targeted to launch in 2026, fortify our near-term capacity and will enable driverless operations without a partner-requested observer.

We are currently track testing our second-generation hardware kit in preparation for on-road driverless operations and we also recently selected Rausch as the upfitter to leverage their manufacturing footprint, which we are initially equipping to produce 20 trucks per week later this year. Looking further ahead, we continue to make great progress on our third-generation commercial hardware kit with Aeva MoVeo. Which is intended to supply tens of thousands of trucks. We welcome Aeva MoVeo’s recent selection of Amazon Web Services as their preferred cloud provider to support their development of an industrialized fallback system for the Aurora Driver. Amazon Web Services has been a longstanding infrastructure partner of Aurora Innovation, Inc.

As we execute our disciplined crawl, walk, run, we are decisively advancing into the walk phase of operations, while positioning to run by the end of the year. Just as the last two years brought robotaxis into the mainstream, we expect 2026 to mark the inflection point where the market recognizes that self-driving trucks have arrived and are quickly becoming a permanent fixture in our transportation landscape. If you are in the Sunbelt in 2026, you will not just read about the Aurora Driver,

Christopher Urmson: you will see it

David Maday: every day. This represents more than a technological achievement. It is the dawn of a superhuman future for freight. With the Aurora Driver, we are deploying a system that sees in every direction simultaneously, operates with stamina that never stops the clock, and makes life-saving decisions in milliseconds without ever getting distracted. The era of superhuman logistics has arrived and Aurora is driving. With that, I am going to hand it over to Dave who will review our financial results.

Christopher Urmson: Thank you, Chris. Now let us review our financial results for which we have provided a summary on Page 16 of the slide deck for reference.

David Maday: Fourth quarter 2025 revenue totaled

Christopher Urmson: $1,000,000

David Maday: across driverless and vehicle-operator supervised commercial loads for Hirschbach, Uber Freight, Werner, FedEx, Schneider, and Volvo Autonomous Solutions, among others. The Aurora Driver achieved another record number of commercial miles driven during the quarter, which drove a 25% sequential increase in revenue from the third quarter. We recognized revenue of $3,000,000 in fiscal year 2025. Total year adjusted revenue inclusive of pilot revenue earned in 2025 before we began recognizing revenue with our commercial launch in 2025 was $4,000,000. Fourth quarter operating loss, including stock-based comp, totaled

Christopher Urmson: $238,000,000

David Maday: excluding stock-based comp of $48,000,000. R&D totaled $155,000,000, SG&A was $30,000,000, and the cost of revenue was $6,000,000. We used approximately $146,000,000 and $581,000,000, respectively, in operating cash during the fourth quarter and fiscal 2025. Capital expenditures totaled $8,000,000 and $31,000,000, respectively, during the fourth quarter and fiscal 2025. This cash spend was meaningfully below our externally communicated target, reflecting continued strong fiscal discipline. We ended the year with a very strong balance sheet, including liquidity of nearly $1,500,000,000 in cash and short-term and long-term investments.

During the fourth quarter, we generated net proceeds of $15,000,000 from the issuance of Class A common stock through our at-the-market program, which we used to fund the tax liability associated with vesting of employee restricted stock units during the quarter. In 2026, we expect revenue of $14,000,000 to $16,000,000, up 400% year over year at the midpoint. Revenue will be back-end loaded, with the fourth quarter projected to contribute over half of full-year revenue as we scale driverless operations without a partner-requested observer following the launch of our new fleet.

We anticipate exiting the year with more than 200 driverless trucks in operation, which translates to approximately $80,000,000 in revenue on a run-rate basis for our Transportation-as-a-Service business, in which we own and operate the trucks. This establishes a powerful foundation for 2027 when we expect the DAS model to commence. We expect our second-generation commercial kit to drive a 50%+ reduction in our hardware costs. With this and other planned cost reductions, we are targeting breakeven gross margin on a run-rate basis exiting 2026. To support our 2026 scaling plan, we expect quarterly cash use of approximately $190,000,000 to $220,000,000 on average. We believe we have sufficient liquidity to achieve positive free cash flow in 2028.

We plan to utilize the ATM to fund our ongoing RSU tax liabilities and cash bonus payments through 2027. We also expect to strategically leverage the ATM and/or other mechanisms to solidify our balance sheet with an appropriate minimum cash balance to support our longer-term operations. Building on the momentum of our landmark commercial launch, we are now focused on the execution and strategic investments necessary to scale. As we roll out our second-generation commercial hardware kit on our new truck fleet and accelerate driverless operations, we will further extend our leadership position in autonomous trucking, which we believe will deliver sustained long-term value for our shareholders. With that, we will now open the call to Q&A. Thank you.

We will now be conducting a question and answer session. Our first question today is coming from Ravi Shanker from Morgan Stanley. Your line is now live.

Stacy Feit: Hi, this is Nancy on for Ravi. Thanks for taking my question. Thank you so much for all the 2026 guidance, but it would be helpful to kind of square away the end-of-year truck guidance with the revenue expectations. Is there something that I should be thinking about with utilization there? Or is that ramp up to over 200 really reserved for the near end of 2026?

Christopher Urmson: Yes. When we think about guidance again, we believe

David Maday: we are going to have an outstanding position in the second half. But we are launching the fleet in the second quarter, and so there is going to be a sequential growth associated with that. So our revenue is going to be back-end loaded, really to the third and predominantly the fourth quarters. But we do expect to be operating more than 200 trucks at the end of the year, and we would expect that to translate to roughly $80,000,000 in revenue that is leading into 2027.

Stacy Feit: Okay. Got it. Thank you. And then

George Gianarikas: be also helpful to hear a bit more on your expected timeline within 2027 for the start of serial commercial production?

David Maday: Yes. It is a good question, Nancy. I think serial production is going to mean different things to different people. I expect we would describe it more along the way as how are we continuing to grow the driverless miles that we are operating and the revenue. We will be building upon our fleet of trucks that we launch this year, the International-based truck where we are going to have over 200, and you are going to get steady growth, and that is going to accelerate into 2027. In addition, we expect that we will be adding on other platforms.

Those OEMs have not announced their final timing, but we expect that in 2027, we will start to see incremental volume appear from that. Serial production is really mostly from how you would describe serial production. I think once we bring in our third-generation hardware kit with Aeva MoVeo, we then have the ability to start building tens of thousands of trucks and that is the trigger for more of serial production that you would think of in the automotive industry.

Christopher Urmson: Thank you. Next question today is coming from Andres Sheppard-Slinger from Cantor Fitzgerald. Your line is now live. Hey guys, good afternoon. Thanks so much for taking our question and

David Maday: congrats on all the great progress and all that guidance, very, very helpful. Chris, David, maybe just a quick question on the target for the more than 200 trucks by year-end. Hoping to get maybe a bit more color there if possible. That should probably correlate with the revenue ramp up, so most of it backloaded, maybe most of it Q4. And then how are you thinking about kind of piloted versus fully driverless? Just to be clear, are these going to be eventually fully driverless? Or how are you thinking about the pilot or the observer there? Thank you.

David Maday: Yep. So when we talk about that fleet of 200+ trucks,

Christopher Urmson: that is no-observer driverless,

David Maday: no one behind the wheel. Right? That is exactly where we are heading, and that is really a critical enabler of scaling. We have the trucks on order. We expect to see them delivered. And we have put in place a partnership with Rausch to assemble and upfit. So we are very excited about that. As Dave said, Q2 is when we expect the first of these to hit the road. And then we kick in the manufacturing to scale this in Q3 at full rate, where we expect to be producing 20 trucks a week.

David Maday: And just one other thing. It is important to mention, when we talk about driverless, the miles that we report today, these are driverless miles. We do have a ride observer who does not operate and does not have the responsibility to operate the vehicle. This is merely removing the requested partner ride observer requirement. So in future, you will see the operations the same as before, we just will not have a ride observer, and that is an element for us to scale our business.

Christopher Urmson: It is going to be a hell of a year.

David Maday: Looking forward to it. That is super helpful. Really appreciate the color there.

Christopher Pierce: Maybe one quick one for us. A number that resonated with us is the 50% improvement in the driver hardware cost of the new gen. Can you maybe help us understand that a bit better? Is that a result of the scale and the volume, but also some synergies on the cost side? Just hoping you can maybe give us a bit more granularity there. Thank you.

David Maday: Yeah. There is a collection of things. So the first-generation hardware, as we said in the past, we built in-house, we tested it thoroughly, we did all of the work necessary to have conviction in safety of it. But in parallel with that, we were working to produce a moderate-scale industrialized product as well. And that is the second-generation hardware. There we have been able to take another cut at the design for manufacturability, the design for cost, and we have taken material cost out of that kit. Some of that comes from computation where we have saved some expenditure there as well.

And then of course advancements in things like our FirstLight LiDAR, where again, we have been able to take a design-for-manufacturability and design-for-cost perspective on that, which was appropriate. What is even more exciting is as that third-generation hardware kit comes out with Aeva MoVeo, there is another whole level of that again comes with their experience in designing cost-effective parts for the automotive industry, and their ability to tap into even larger-scale supply chains which further drive down the cost of it. So 2026 is going to be healthier, and 2027 is going to be

Christopher Urmson: spectacular. Thank you. Next question is coming from Colin Rusch from Oppenheimer. Your line is now live.

Colin Rusch: Thanks so much. With some of the incremental functionality that you guys are talking about here, can you talk a little bit about the inbound interest you are getting from incremental customers? And how quickly you are able to move them through a sales process to get them on board here?

David Maday: Yeah. Well, I would look at that as a prime example of this. So we talked for a long time about the value to customers of long hauls and being able to drive utilization of the assets up. Frankly, it did not really occur to us to think about a situation like Detmar where the truck is not actually going that far. It is a 60-mile each way

Christopher Urmson: trip.

David Maday: But asset utilization is absolutely critical to their business. They saw our launch, saw the announcement, came out and reached out to us. And they came to us because we are the only people who can do what they need: be able to drive both on the surface roads, go to their mine site, and drive on the freeway. And so that is an example of us being able to take this generalized capability we have, then respond to customer demand. We continue to see other examples of folks who are excited about what this could mean to further business. And we will share more as we move along here.

Colin Rusch: Great. And then in terms of some of the incremental functionality that you are talking about this year, I am trying to get a sense of the cycle time with some of the learning processes. You guys have obviously done a great job with the simulation technology and validating things online. But I am curious about how we can track the cadence of incremental operating domains and environments from a weather perspective. Throughout the year, it looks like we have got a pretty clear line of sight in the charts that you are providing. But just want to see how we should track that on a go-forward basis?

David Maday: So I think what is exciting is we are near the end of the point where you are probably going to care about that. As I talked about, there are these two elements to expanding where the vehicle operates. The first is having the generalizable set of skills that allow you to operate there. And then the second is actually rolling out the map so that the vehicle has that extra knowledge and prior understanding of what to expect where it is driving. On the first part of that, we are most of the way there to having all of the capabilities that you might imagine needing.

And any new lane gets less and less likely to—diminishing to de minimis—things that we have to learn and add to the capabilities of the Driver. So as we pointed out, going from operating between Fort Worth and Phoenix and operating between Dallas and Laredo, very, very light lift, and we expect an even lighter lift as we open up new lanes as well.

On the mapping front, this is a place where the approaches we have taken with AI to be able to detect and understand the road structure, to be able to gather data and then feed that back to the mothership, are making a huge difference because we can take that online system, run it offline, verify, validate it, and then create the road data product. At this point, the vast majority of the miles that we generate are automatically generated. So we expect that to accelerate. What is really going to be driving the rate at which we expand over the next year is going to be the customer demand.

Because we can be responsive, this decision of which lane to open next goes from being a strategic, let’s ponder this for months, to, okay, let’s go now and serve that customer as quickly as possible. And then we will just continue to, on the development side, be continuing to chip away at the places where we see incremental value for customers and increasing the uptime and availability of the vehicle.

Christopher Pierce: Thank you.

Operator: Next question is coming from Chris Pierce from Needham & Company. Your line is now live.

Christopher Pierce: Hey, good afternoon. You guys

Operator: positive free cash flow in 2028. I believe you

Christopher Alan Pierce: first mentioned that at the Analyst Day in 2024. But I am sorry if I missed it, but I do not see anything about revenues or gross margin guidance in 2028. I guess should investors read into that as maybe the revenue ramp is flatter, but maybe you have more OpEx leverage as you lean into AI around mapping, or how should we put the pieces together there?

Colin Rusch: Yeah. Hey, Chris. Great question.

David Maday: Appreciate it. So I think there are a couple of things. When we did the guidance back at the Analyst Day, we had some expectations about where we thought we were going to be for free cash flow positive. And actually, those expectations overall still look remarkably similar in terms of the revenue projections and our gross margin projections over time.

What we have been able to do is really look at our spending and, over the last year and a half, two years, we have been a little bit under what we have actually guided to in terms of total cash burn, and that has given us confidence to say that with the money that we raised this past year, which has been remarkable, tremendous support from investors, we ended the year again with roughly $1,500,000,000 in liquidity. And if we look at our model and look at the long term out, we believe that is sufficient to get us to free cash flow positive.

Again, we will utilize the ATM for our tax liabilities and for potential bonus payments that would be made in cash, and we will obviously want to have some sort of minimum balance on a go-forward basis like any prudent company would. But the cash necessary to get us there, we felt like we have sufficient cash in hand to be able to do that, and we felt that was appropriate to describe.

We are not going to guide beyond 2026 on some of the other spending items right now, but I think we will end up having another analyst/investor day this year, and we will probably provide an outlook into the future beyond 2026 where we can talk about some of those longer-term targets.

Christopher Alan Pierce: Okay. Perfect. Thank you for that. And then I guess you hear about this momentum, Waymo and Tesla momentum or not, but this is the first time you guys have talked about capacity and being sold out through X amount of time and going forward. Are you hearing new—are customers getting enthusiastic about autonomy again? Or is this something that you already knew and this is the first time you are sharing this sort of supply versus demand imbalance in the near term with investors?

David Maday: Yeah. Let me take a shot and then maybe Chris can add into this. I think customer interest has been strong for years. Customer demand has continued to increase as people have gotten to experience the products. And we had always said our first driverless customers, we were going to have to earn that right to get to that higher level of demand signal. I think that was one element. So I think the demand has continued to lead the way in the customer interest. And it helps guide where we want to go. As an example, the reason we are going to Laredo is really strong customer interest to be able to do that.

And with our generalized AI approach right now, it does not take a tremendous amount of effort to take advantage of that next lane. And so our customer demand is really driving where we are going to be going next. I think one of the things that we have been a little bit apprehensive of overstating—and this is lessons learned relative to other AV companies—is we really wanted to have solidified a firm plan relative to our truck supply to be able to be confident in the contracted amounts of volume that we were going to deliver for customers. So there is a difference between interest and truly contracted demand.

We felt like this was a good time that we could give you the confidence that we not only have a ton of interest, but we really have contracted demand. That is predicated on the fact that we have confidence in the roughly exact timing of the trucks that we are going to have in the market.

David Maday: I would just add a couple of things to Dave’s point. I think if you go to any truck company and you say, we are going to make your trucks safer, more efficient, and increase their utilization, everyone is going to say yes. And what has happened since April is we have been able to go from academic conversation of “wouldn’t it be nice if” to

Christopher Urmson: hey. It is here.

David Maday: We have got it. Come see it. Come touch it. Come experience it. And I think that has moved the academic interest into the practical interest. And as Dave said, we have tried to be consistent in not overhyping things. And in the past, we have seen competitors talk about numbers of commitments and sales that

Christopher Pierce: you have felt

David Maday: more smoke and mirrors than real. And so we have tried very hard to be just direct and honest with, no, these are real contracts and commitments that we have. And that is why we feel confident at this point starting to share a little more of those numbers.

Christopher Pierce: Thank you.

Operator: Our next question is coming from Leanne Hayden from Canaccord Genuity. Your line is now live.

Stacy Feit: Good evening, everyone. Thanks so much for taking my questions.

George Gianarikas: To the extent that you are able to comment, curious how you expect the observerless launch on International trucks in the next few months to impact OEM partners, specifically in terms of comfortability around removing the safety observer or launching immediately without an observer?

David Maday: Yeah. I think that continued demonstration of the product on the road and continued demand and engagement from customers will only supercharge what is already a really positive and enthusiastic engagement that we have with these OEM partners. There is nothing like seeing and nothing like experiencing it for real. And so I do not foresee any problems moving forward with this.

David Maday: Yeah. Maybe let me just add one additional thing on here. And I think each OEM and their path with us is a little bit different. Volvo, whether we had launched this International fleet or not launched International fleet, we have a plan with them. They are executing towards that plan. And what makes them feel comfortable. We have a path with PACCAR. They were a little bit uncomfortable because they have prototype parts on their base components. And so that is why we had the ride observer to begin with, and they wanted to have comfort with the fact that they have fully validated their process.

With the International fleet, we are producing a truck that is a base truck that has all the required redundancies at a very sufficient level. So these are not prototype parts. These are fully validated parts that we validated with the rest of our system. And so each of them is a little bit different and nuanced. And hopefully, this is going to continue to build momentum overall that the market and everybody’s excitement about having an opportunity to deploy trucks that operate driverlessly.

George Gianarikas: Got it. Yeah. That totally makes sense. I will just ask one more quick one. Curious whether or not Aurora trucks came to interact with any sort of winter weather conditions in Texas as a result of the recent storm Fern? And if so, how it performed?

David Maday: Yeah. We certainly did some development operations in the conditions, but those would be run with a safety operator in the vehicle because that is out of scope for the current driverless capability. What I will tell you is that the conditions in Texas were bad enough that everybody was off the road for the majority of the time.

Operator: Thank you. Next question is coming from Mark Delaney from Goldman Sachs. Your line is now live.

Mark Delaney: Yes, good afternoon. Thank you very much for taking the questions. And nice to see the expanded operating domain, both with respect to the lanes as well as the extended weather conditions. First question was on how you see the composition of the trucks evolving this year and for the incremental trucks to get to the 200 in total, do you expect some of that to come from Volvo given the progress you spoke about with VNL? Or will the incremental truck volumes this year effectively come all from that International relationship? Yes. I guess, cannot

David Maday: share Volvo’s launch timeline. That is one of the things that we leave with our OEM partners. What I would tell you is we are extremely confident in the supply of vehicles we have to achieve that 200+ objective by the end of the year.

Christopher Urmson: Okay. I understood. And then my other question was

Mark Delaney: on the 2027 outlook and line-side integration. I am hoping to get more details on where you stand and if you think there may be some risk of delay. And I ask because, I think in order to do that line-side integration next year, you would need the truck OEMs to have redundant platforms ready, you need Aeva MoVeo to be prepared to integrate on-site, and then the third-gen hardware kit needs to be available. So I know a lot of things you are working on and the partners are working on. So if you could speak a bit more on where you stand on those various things and your visibility into achieving that 2027 plan that would be helpful?

Thank you.

David Maday: Yeah. Well, let us just take Volvo as a concrete example. Part of the reason why we are so excited about the first trucks coming off of the pilot line with Volvo is that is a critical step in both Aurora and Volvo understanding how to do this integration, and really paves the way for that line-side production. When it comes to Aeva MoVeo, the third-generation hardware and Aeva MoVeo, that is really one thing. And that partnership is spectacular. We continue to have an amazing working relationship with them. We have talked in the past about how that deal and that partnership aligns incentives near perfectly. And we are seeing that play out in reality.

And both Aurora and Aeva MoVeo are committed to achieving our start of production of that in 2027. So we are very excited for that. And then, of course, we augment the line-side installation with our own partners, with the infrastructure we are putting in place with Rausch, to allow us to upfit and even scale up the production we are talking about this year to be able to produce significant volumes on the International LT platform as well. So like I said, 2027 is going to be a heck of a lot of fun.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question today is coming from Itay Michaeli from TD Cowen & Company. Your line is now live.

Mark Delaney: Great, thanks. Hi, everybody.

Christopher Urmson: Just wanted to go back to the customer interest into 2027 with a pipeline of thousands of trucks. Hoping you could talk a bit more about that. And how much visibility do you have

Mark Delaney: in terms of the number of lanes that you might need to support that level of demand?

David Maday: Yeah. So maybe I will take a start, and Dave, I will hand it to you. So in terms of the lane side of this, yes, we model this and we look at the Southern U.S. freight corridor that we are talking about operating on by the end of this year. I think that can absorb an immense amount of traffic and will still be a very small fraction of the vehicle fleet that is out there today. And of course, we will not be static in 2027 with that, given that ability and accelerated ability to build map content.

And the generalized nature of the Aurora Driver, unlocking new lanes is not going to be a complicated activity for us. It will just be a course-of-action operational exercise that we do relatively rapidly. And so I am not worried about our ability to roll out new lanes in 2027 and to be able to absorb that volume. But Dave, do you want to

David Maday: Yeah. I think there are a couple of things that we are really demonstrating, and these are true in 2026, not even in 2027. It is our ability to go where the customer wants us to go and add lanes, and add the lanes where they are high volume and they generate value for our customers. So it is not just the lanes, but it is going to customer endpoints. We are doing both of those things right now. We have just added the Dallas–Laredo. That is a new thing we have not talked about before, and we are going to have it rolling out this quarter.

So again, I think our ability to go to where our customers want is the key enabler to actually deploy thousands of trucks. Now, thousands of trucks, if you just look at some of the lane routes that we have showed before—which we have no concerns over being able to drive in all those areas—those represent 50 to 60 billion vehicle miles traveled. So to deploy thousands of trucks in a market size that big, with the sheer volume of trucks that are out there and the mileage that is driven, feels very attainable to us.

The reason why we have such conviction in this is that some of our customers, both our existing customers and even new customers, when they talk about interest in deploying autonomy, they are talking about large quantities of volume. Some customers have huge fleets, big package delivery, and for them, unless we can do thousands of trucks, it is not worthwhile for them because it just ends up being such a small percentage of things. So when we are able to deliver more trucks, the customer demand for those larger customers that want to deploy at higher volume just becomes more evident for them. So we are really excited about where we are headed.

And we think we have the building blocks in place to get there.

Colin Rusch: Terrific. Very helpful. As a quick follow-up, I am just curious, on the second-generation commercial hardware kit on the new fleet with International. How locked in are the costs at this stage? How should we think about the ramp? And ultimately, leading to

David Maday: of like what can go right and wrong and the target to a breakeven gross margin by the end of the year

David Maday: Maybe just start with the first part of this. So at this point, we have well understood the cost. There is some exposure to

Christopher Urmson: variation in tariffs, depending on the policy of

David Maday: current administration. That obviously we cannot predict. But beyond that, we are locked and loaded there. And between the engagement we have with Fabrinet and the process work we have been running through with them, and now the committed partnership we have with Rausch and the facilities we are turning online there, that part, we understand the cost structure. The rest of the cost structure is really about the remote support and recovery rates that are associated with this. And those we feel good about the glide path we are on to achieving the rates that we need to reach gross margin.

David Maday: Yeah. And just maybe one additional thing, and Chris did a great job in just talking about the hardware kit for a second. There are three elements of the hardware kit that from a financial perspective that you think about between the first gen and the second gen. It is the BOM, it is the scale, and it is the expertise. So if I look at it, we have done remarkably well in the BOM where we have designed lower-cost solutions. We have reduced the mass of the compute, as an example. We have made incredible improvements on FirstLight. So we have designed—we did engineering challenges to design that.

Scale, we have hardware kits today that can operate roughly about 300,000 miles; these hardware kits are going to last to a million miles. So you just get the benefit of them lasting longer, which reduces your per-mile cost. And then the manufacturing expertise—we are going to somebody that knows how to build in high volumes with Fabrinet and higher volumes, whereas we are just not set up that way. We are more of kind of a prototype build. In terms of the confidence in that, we have contracted with suppliers all the part costs already. The FX exposure, we have taken a conservative approach and used the latest assumptions for the two biggest areas, which are China and Thailand.

So I think we built in the right elements to be confident in that. And I think with the remote assistance and the on-site support, we are going to be able to demonstrate that very well once we have sufficient number of trucks operating on the roads where we can actually start to report out some of those

Christopher Pierce: numbers.

Operator: Thank you. We have reached the end of our question and answer session. Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude today’s teleconference and webcast. You may disconnect your lines at this time and have a wonderful day. We thank you for your participation today.

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