<\/p>\n
Autonomous vehicle technology company Aurora Innovation released its third-quarter earnings report after the bell Wednesday. The company closed out the quarter with about $1.2 billion in cash and short-term investments, which Aurora says will be enough to make it to commercial launch in mid-2024.<\/p>\n
Those statements were made just days after former competitor Argo AI shut down operations and Mobileye went public with the third most successful IPO of the year. Both moves are a sign that automakers that were once willing to invest billions into the development of AV tech without near-term profit gains are now turning their attention and resources back to near-term profit centers like advanced driver assistance systems in passenger-owned vehicles. So the question becomes, can Aurora hang on?<\/p>\n
Chief financial officer Richard Tame did say during the investor call that Aurora will need to raise more funds, but the company wouldn\u2019t clarify to if that would happen pre- or post-2024 launch. (However, in a memo leaked in September, CEO Chris Urmson wrote to Aurora\u2019s board that there was value in finding a \u201cpath to raise $300 million in the next year to add around six months to our runway.\u201d) Given the current economic situation and Aurora\u2019s cash burn history, the company might be able to make it to 2024 with the funds it currently has, but only just \u2014 and only if it keeps costs in line.<\/p>\n
During the third quarter, Aurora\u2019s loss from operations totaled $200 million, which is up from the $128 million reported during the same quarter of last year, but down from the nearly $1.2 billion in losses from the second quarter of 2022. If the startup were able to maintain a $200 million net loss starting in the fourth quarter until the first quarter of 2024, it wouldn\u2019t need to raise more cash before commercial launch. But as a pre-revenue startup working on frontier technology, Aurora will incur tremendous costs in R&D to scale and bring its product to market.\u00a0In addition, Aurora would need to somehow avoid being impacted by inflation and supply chain constraints. The upshot? Aurora will need to find efficiencies across the board.<\/p>\n
The leaked memo also\u00a0outlined an array of cost-cutting and cash-generating options to Aurora\u2019s board, including a hiring freeze, potential layoffs, spinning out assets, going private and even selling itself to high-profile tech companies. Aurora didn\u2019t mention any of these potential realities during its earnings call, but that doesn\u2019t mean they\u2019re off the table.<\/p>\n
The Street responded favorably to Aurora\u2019s attempts to assuage investors. The company\u2019s stock is up 5.85% after market close.<\/p>\n
Aurora has prioritized commercializing autonomous freight through a series of pilot partnerships with FedEx, Paccar, Schneider, Werner and Xpress. But the company is also working with Toyota to eventually launch a subscription service for the ride-hailing market. Earlier this year, the company unveiled its test fleet of Toyota Siennas that were custom built for robotaxi operations. In the third quarter, Aurora recognized about $3 million in collaboration revenue from Toyota.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Autonomous vehicle technology company Aurora Innovation released its third-quarter earnings report after the bell Wednesday. The company closed out the quarter with about $1.2 billion in cash and short-term investments, which Aurora says will be enough to make it to commercial launch in mid-2024. Those statements were made just days after former competitor Argo AI […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1242426,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1242424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrity-gossip"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1242424","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1242424"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1242424\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1242424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1242424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1242424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}