Aurora Innovation, Inc. Class A Common Stock Investor update

Thank you everyone for joining us today. Before we begin the Q&A portion of today's town hall, I want to quickly note that as you just saw at the end of the video, we will be making forward-looking statements. These statements are based on assumptions and beliefs as of today's date and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Please refer to the risk factors and other disclosures in our most recent annual report on Form 10-K and our other filings with the SEC. Now on to Q&A. First, thank you to everyone who submitted and upvoted questions. We had a tremendous turnout. We're going to extend our time together today to cover as much ground as possible. A quick note on how the segment will work.

We'll be addressing the top upvoted questions submitted by our retail investor community, all of which have been anonymized. Please keep in mind, we aren't in a position to provide investment advice, and we won't be discussing our financial outlook beyond the 2026 guidance we've already provided. With that, let's dive in. Chris, Dave, the most upvoted question we received is, there has been a lot of speculation about AI leading to commoditization of autonomous drivers. How would you respond to this speculation? Do you believe Aurora has a defensible moat? Is the industry nearing an inflection point where it's nearly impossible for new competitors to enter the market?

That's a great question. We're all seeing the incredible advances in AI, and we're seeing those actually help our business and help move us forward. It's important though to understand that there's a big gap between a demo you could vibe code together or the way that you can leverage AI to get part of the problem, what it takes to really solve and industrialize a safety-critical problem like what we have. Deploying our models on the road, we take the responsibility of that very seriously. I think anyone should. We're operating an 80,000-pound vehicle, moving at 70 miles an hour down the freeway. There's a lot of things that go beyond just train a model quickly and then see what happens. Beyond that, we're actually making a physical thing. And we've invested over many years into three generations of hardware.

The hardware that we had on the road initially that allowed us to prove the technology, begin operating driverlessly, do that safely. Our second generation hardware that we just launched now that allow us to scale to 1,500 units, and then our third generation hardware with AUMOVIO. That supply chain moat, the know-how that comes along with that, the ability to actually just produce hardware, I think is going to be an incredible asset for us. Of course, we also have this amazing network of customers and ecosystem that we've built around us. And each day that we're operating, as we put more trucks on the road, as we learn more with those customers, as those customers learn more about the Aurora Driver, get used to using it. That first-mover advantage and lead that we have, we think will continue to compound.

It's important to note that today we are the only company running driverless trucks on the road. And every day we're doing that, we are learning. We're building trust with customers. We're building that base, and we think that that will continue to compound into an advantage, and we really see that moving forward. Do I see us having a moat? Absolutely. Do I see us continue to widen that moat? For sure. Do I think AI is an important part of how we are going to continue to build the Aurora Driver, how we operate our business?

Absolutely. Absolutely. Our next question.

Given the existing liquidity is sufficient to achieve positive free cash flow by 2028, when do you expect to transition away from equity dilutive financing, such as the ATM program, and incorporate non-dilutive methods, say, debt facilities or equipment financing?

Thanks, Stacy, and thanks for the question. It's a great question. We're always concerned about dilutive financing and we take this impact on shareholders seriously. At the same time, we need to make sure that we have sufficient cash and runway to operate our business with the flexibility that's needed. We think we're in an amazing position right now. We have a really strong balance sheet, $1.2 billion in liquidity, which we believe will get us to a positive free cash flow in 2028. When you think about the ATM usage in the near term, really, for us, we're only planning it to, one, cover our issue tax liabilities and cash bonus payouts in 2027. Then we'll use it opportunistically like we've done before.

I think for us, we have to continuously evaluate what financing mechanisms we have in place to make sure that we have an appropriate cash balance, not just to achieve positive free cash flow, but an appropriate cash balance for the long term. We're always exploring new opportunities and we're really excited about where we are today.

Great. Thanks, Dave. Moving on to the next one. What's a realistic timeline for converting current pilot evaluation relationships into named binding customer announcements?

Yeah. So great news is this has already happened, right? We are revenue generating with customers today. We're excited to see customers on the road making commitments. We've shared a number of customers who are operating with us, and we expect continue to grow their fleets. It's really important to understand the context of the conversation here, right? That self-driving trucks are a new thing. As we began operating them, we were really fortunate to have an incredible set of customers who are top tier, best in class in the logistics space. They're learning with us and adopting this technology. Of course, they want to see it. I was talking with Zach, who leads our BD team earlier today. Back in 2023, we'd expect it take a couple of years, right? This is just brand new. It goes through a process. They have to get comfortable with it.

There really isn't other proof points out there of this working. At this point, the initial conversation often we have with a customer, and that's sending them a contract. On that contract, we're talking about driverless operation. We're excited to see this. The validation we get from our customers, these incredible partners that we have, is really helping fuel the funnel and momentum here. We're seeing a lot of demand, right? We mentioned we're already fully allocated for this year, and we continue to see demand for a Driver-as-a-Service business going forward.

Absolutely. Our next question, how many Aurora Driver-equipped trucks do you expect to be fully driverless and generating commercial revenue by the end of 2026 and the end of 2027? What are the main constraints that could prevent production capacity from converting into deployed trucks?

Yeah, that's a great question. For 2026, we're really excited about where we are. We expect, and again, our target was to have at least 200 trucks operating commercially, driverless on public roads, and we expect to achieve that. We're fully contracted to be able to achieve that right now. So for us, 2026, we've got clear line of sight. Importantly, one of the things that was critical is not just 2026, but do you have the capacity, do you have the partners in place to go and achieve some of our scale goals? We've talked about scaling to 1,000 plus trucks in the future, right? For us, we've got our partnerships with Roush that will allow us to build 20 trucks a week by October, sometime in October timeframe. That equates to 1,000 trucks a year.