Positions: 50,000 shares at $3.90 - will hold to a $5bn - $10bn market cap
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I am not your financial advisor, I am your enabler - and I will continue to load up on this asymmetric af opportunity. I am also the lunatic willingly holding this into both a share unlock and upcoming dilution.
The question to ask yourself as you read this, chant it with me now = "is AUR worth 17x KDK?"
TLDR for the attention span impaired
- $AUR (Aurora) = $13B. $KDK (KodiakAI) = $750M
- Kodiak is the only company on earth that's sold a driverless semi-truck to a customer who owns and runs it themselves. 35 trucks, 40,000+ paid driverless hours, 21 months using it, with a clean FMCSA record. That customer went from 10 trucks...to 35, now committed to 100 in 2027
- Both CEOs came off the same Google self-driving team
- Driver-out on Texas highways for KDK committed for December. Safety-case readiness 84 > 86 > 91 > 93% in August
- Nine firms cover it, not one single one has a sell and average at $10.70
- Risks are very fucking real: shares unlock this Sept 24th, a raise is coming, read the bad news at the bottom
The stock is down 67% in a year, mainly because financing in May priced 30% below market blew up the stock, which was good news for me in many ways
In the meantime = they got onto PACCAR's analyst slides, signed a Bosch deal that makes OEM integration easier, expanded Atlas and took highway readiness from 84% to 93%
Physical AI is the next mania sector (imo)
Our dear leader Jensen Huang called autonomous driving physical AI's first killer app at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference on 10th September (not humanoids doing fucking backflips around a warehouse)
The opportunity to invest here is almost bare on the trucking side, you have 2 picks - AUR and KDK.
Where Aurora is clearly ahead
I'm not dumb (maybe some think I am), but credit where it's due Aurora went driver out on public highways before Kodiak, runs a bigger fleet, has $1.2bn in the bank (but burns $1bn a year...), and has OEM deals with PACCAR and Volvo that Kodiak doesn't
On the OEM deals however = none of them are exclusive, PACCAR runs a multi-partner strategy, and Volvo is running Waabi alongside Aurora
PACCAR has dragged its feet from the get go. We're four years in, they asked Aurora to put a human observer back in, and Feight (CEO) still says they have "no plans to take the driver out at this point"
More importantly when it comes to OEM's, factory integration is generally a 2028+ story for everybody (Volvo aren't going to start churning out thousands of trucks on day one for AUR in 2027, they plan for something around 300 across the year)
Meaning AUR sure as fuck isn't worth 17x more value imo as things stand
The rest of the sector
Everyone in this sector tests on public highways with a safety driver. But the important thing is "is it driverless and is someone paying for it", and there are two players currently in this game regards, and you guessed it: Aurora, and Kodiak
|Company|Valuation|Driver-out class-8 freight, for a paying customer|
|:-|:-|:-|
||
|Aurora|$13B|Yes \- since 2025; Gen2 trucks empty-cab from July 2026|
|Waabi|$3.5B (private round)|Not yet - supervised testing|
|Stack AV|$1B raised from SoftBank in one round|Not yet|
|Torc|91% Daimler-owned; $660M a year of spend|Not yet - driver-out proven on a closed course, public roads targeted 2027|
|Plus|$800M (attempting to list via a 2nd SPAC, this will de-spac this time imo)|Not yet - supervised testing|
|Bot Auto|$45M raised; valuation undisclosed|Yes, but fuck all - a paid driverless Houston-Dallas run in April, on a fleet of about 8 trucks|
|Kodiak|$750M|Yes \- 21 months