Autonomous trucking company, Kodiak Robotics, Inc., announced today $125 million in Series B … [+]
Kodiak Robotics
Autonomous trucking company Kodiak Robotics Inc. announced Wednesday it has raised $125 million in an oversubscribed Series B funding round. That new cash infusion brings its total fundraising to $165 million, the company said in a release.
The Mountain View, Calif. startup said it will use the additional funds to double its headcount in the next year by adding 85 new employees, expand autonomous service capabilities from coast-to-coast, and add a minimum of 15 new trucks bringing its fleet to at least 25 autonomous vehicles.
Kodiak currently delivers freight daily for its customers between Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas and Houston, operating autonomously on the highway portion of the route.
Major investors in this new funding round include SIP Global Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Battery Ventures, CRV, Muirwoods Ventures, Harpoon Ventures, StepStone Group, Gopher Asset Management, Walleye Capital, Aliya Capital Partners. Bridgestone Americas and BMW i Ventures are among previously announced investors.
Don Burnette, Founder and CEO, Kodiak Robotics.
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“Our Series B drives us into hyper-growth so we can double our team, our fleet, and continue to scale our business,” said Don Burnette, Founder and CEO, Kodiak Robotics in a statement. “We have engineered our industry-leading technology, the Kodiak Driver, in half the time and a fraction of the cost of our competitors. The supply chain challenges we have seen over the last 18 months only underscore the importance of autonomous trucking to the future of America’s economy. With the Series B, we will further accelerate towards launching our commercial self-driving service with our partners in the coming years to help address these critical challenges.”
Since 2019 Kodiak has been hauling freight daily for a range of industry partners, including some of the nation’s largest carriers and brands, the company said.
The news comes on the heels of Kodiak’s September unveiling of its fourth generation autonomous truck. The company was due to take delivery of 15 trucks during this quarter. A key feature of the new trucks is the use of a modular and discrete sensor approach to simplify installation and maintenance, while increasing safety, according to the company.
“Complex and bulky systems that require an engineer to hand-build and hand-tune are expensive, unreliable, and difficult to debug,” said Burnette in a release announcing the new generation of Kodiak autonomous trucks on Sept. 28. “We believe that reliability and scalability flow from simplicity, and the best hardware modifications should be barely visible. Our fourth-generation platform is designed for simple, scaled production which means easy calibration, troubleshooting and maintenance for our partners.”
In May, Kodiak announced a partnership with SK Inc., a holding company of SK Group, South Korea’s third-largest conglomerate with more than 120 operating companies. That partnership would bring Kodiak Driver, the company’s self-driving technology, to the Asia-Pacific (APAC) markets.