On November 4, the autonomous driving company Aurora completed a merger with SPAC company Reinvent Technology Partners Y and was listed on the NASDAQ.
After the merger was completed, the stock code was AUR, and the new company paid $13 billion.
After trading officially began, the opening price on the same day was $10, and the stock price went all the way up. At one point, it rose by more than 10%. The stock price peaked at 11.7 US dollars, and the market capitalization exceeded 13.5 billion US dollars. According to this market capitalization, Umson's net worth is over 4 billion US dollars.
As the highest-valued driverless car startup in the world, as the first platform-based autonomous driving company to IPO, and as a company founded by Google's driverless car pioneer, Aurora's listing was a weather vane event.
However, the process of Aurora's listing did not go smoothly.
At first, the roadshow's fundraising fell short of expectations. The 2.5 billion US dollars originally anticipated ended up being 1.8 billion US dollars. This money will be maintained as cash flow until 2024, until large-scale commercial products are launched.
Aurora was founded in 2017 and co-founded by industry leaders Sterling Anderson, Drew Bagnell, and Chris Urmson. Among them, Sterling Anderson was the head of Tesla's Autopilot project, CTO Drew Bagnell worked for Uber's advanced technology team and was responsible for sensing and autonomous software. CEO Chris Urmson led Google's autonomous vehicle project for nearly 8 years.
Currently, Aurora's partners include Toyota, Uber, and Volvo. The goal is to enable vehicles to achieve L4 level autonomous driving, that is, the vehicle does not require human interaction when driving on the road.
On the product side, Aurora is expected to launch its first autonomous driving product by the end of 2023, that is, integrating its technology into Volvo and Paccar Class 8 trucks. As these trucks drive on roads and highways, they will generate revenue for Aurora.
Although the prospects are attractive, achieving the “true driverless” level of technology of L4 is a huge challenge.
In response, company CEO Urmson told CNBC that the team understood that it was difficult to solve this problem, but they had already spent four years laying the foundation for this technology. “Now is the time to transition and implement it.”