Conference Transcript - AUR 2026-09-10

Mark Delaney, Analyst — Goldman Sachs

Okay, great. Thank you, everybody, for joining. My name is Mark Delaney, and I cover Aurora for Goldman Sachs. I'm very pleased to have with us yet again this year Chris Hermsen, who is the co-founder and CEO of Aurora. Thanks for coming.

Speaker 1

Glad to be here. Glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Mark Delaney, Analyst — Goldman Sachs

Well, let's jump right into it. I mean, a lot of interesting stuff that Aurora has been working on, several exciting announcements on your journey and now launch of autonomous trucking. So really exciting stuff. And maybe we can start right there because the company announced actually just this July that you started driverless operations without an observer. Maybe you can talk more around how that launch has gone, any key learning so far.

Speaker 1

Yeah, now that we've woken everybody up, so glad to have everyone here. Yeah, it's gone kind of incredibly, right? So it's been a long journey. A year ago we proved that the technology worked with our launch then. This year, we've been able to launch our second-generation hardware. We've been able to launch our second-generation hardware. AV is really hard, let me remind you. And this is really a platform that will allow us to scale up to 1,500 units and then put us in position to go scale with our third-generation hardware that comes online at the end of next year. So it's been great to see it out on the road. It's been another proof point that's enabled customer enthusiasm and excitement and kind of helped move those conversations forward. And it's really just kind of the starting line for us building and scaling the business.

Mark Delaney, Analyst — Goldman Sachs

Any surprises or things you didn't expect to have that you've learned just since you've taken the Observer out? It feels good.

Speaker 1

It's a lot of work from the team. It really, you know, we launched last year, began operating driver's sleep, but we had kind of the optics challenge. There was a person sat there as this observer, and we knew the bar we were holding it to, we knew that it was safe and operating. But it's very different for the outside world to have that visceral image of, no, there's nobody there. The Aurora driver is fully operating this, and I think that's been very powerful. and, you know, even the most cynical observers can look at that and say, oh, this is real.

Mark Delaney, Analyst — Goldman Sachs

No, very exciting stuff. In order to get those vehicles out, you upfitted a truck. You're using Roush as a partner to do some of that upfitting as well as some in-house upfitting capabilities. Maybe just talk about some of the costs and implications of doing the outfit model here at least in your term.

Speaker 1

Yeah, so our second-generation hardware kit is a major step function both in performance but also in cost reduction. That first generation was really to prove the technology worked. The second generation was about actually having something that was commercially viable in market that we can ultimately be profitable with, and we're seeing that in practice. Roush is great. If you've heard me talk about our strategy in the past, it's really been one of let us focus on what we do best in the world and then go work with folks who are best in the world at what they do, and that's what Roush brings to the table. And, you know, they are a very well-known quantity in the automotive space where if you're an OEM and you need something modified and scaled up or repaired, they're the folks who do it. If you buy an F-150 Raptor, Roush made it a Raptor instead of an F-150. So they know how to do volume. They're working with us now on mass production of this or large, you know, I guess modest scale in OEMs terms for automated vehicles, large scale production. And, you know, we're off the races. We're in that period of kind of production hell, I guess some people might call it, as we kind of get the ramp up. But we're expecting 20 to 25 trucks on the road at the end of this month and we'll be building 20 trucks a week in the not-distant future here.

Mark Delaney, Analyst — Goldman Sachs

That's great. Well, those trucks need to drive somewhere, and one of the key initiatives of the company has been expanding the operating design demand in terms of where you can drive, weather conditions. One of the interesting things I thought Aurora has been focused on has been driving right to customer sites, not just on highway, Tell us a little bit more around how you're doing with that direct-to-customer endpoint part of the ODD.

Speaker 1

Yeah, and this is just one of the things that just makes sense, right? Customers want their stuff to go from A to B, not from some other C to D. And so this has been core to how we've been thinking about the business for a very long time, and we're seeing this in action. We've been operating from customer endpoints for some time now. We're now with our customer, Detmar, operating from the sand mine to the distribution point, just running that many times a day in and out. And we're continuing to operate more places for customers as well. So it's operating exactly the way we expected. It's important to remember that we've been driving between our terminals off highway to these places. Our location in Houston is a five-mile drive from the freeway to that terminal. And so it's not really surprising that we drive to these points for customers as well.

Mark Delaney, Analyst — Goldman Sachs

So you're already doing this today, not just for the off-highway, but even sort of on public roads, you're doing that direct-to-and-place.

Speaker 1

Yeah, when I say off, sorry, when I meant off-highway, I meant on public roads. Like we, you know, it turns out that they don't just put the sand mine connected to the freeway, right? You have to drive through the town and get to the place. And similarly, when we talk with our customers in Phoenix, our customers in Dallas, right, these are places where we're going to endpoint locations for them today. Okay, that makes sense.

Mark Delaney, Analyst — Goldman Sachs

Well, another aspect of expanding the ODD is about lanes, and you've got a number of different routes you've been adding on. Talk a little bit more around where the company is expanding to.

Speaker 1

Yeah, so we're really going where our customers need us today. We expect to have 200 trucks on the road by the end of the year, and it turns out, Texas is big, and there's a lot of places for those trucks to go right there. At the same time, we are accelerating our ability to open new lanes. And to open new lanes for us is really two parts. So one is putting in place the map so the truck can have this kind of anticipation of what's about to happen down the road and not just what it can see over its horizon. And then the other part, of course, is the competence to drive across the different features that are in the world out there. On the mapping side, we've talked for a long time about our Atlas technology, this ability to shard the map and build it efficiently. That just continues to get faster and faster. And the first lane, it took us, what, six years or something to open. The second lane took us six months. The third lane, six weeks. And we continue to see that accelerate. And then on the capability to drive, every time we open a new lane, we go through the place that we're going to operate and ask, is there something novel here? and anytime we find something novel we'll go and build tests those tests will tell us can the aurora driver operate through that or not if the answer comes back that we're not confident in the performance of it then we add a you know a little backlog under the engineering cycle and then we kick it off but every time we solve one of those things that's novel that is not just solving it for that gps coordinate here right it's solving it for every other instance of that thing that was novel there. So, you know, if, for example, it was a three-way stop was a thing that we couldn't handle or we hadn't got the tests in place for, once we've tested three-way stops, it's now, okay, every other three-way stop that we would encounter is in scope and able to drive. And so you can see how very quickly with not many places that you drive that are useful, you've accumulated the skills that are necessary to really generalize and operate broadly across the Sun Belt. And that's, you know, we're very excited about seeing.

Mark Delaney, Analyst — Goldman Sachs

Yeah, as you do some of those test and validation points, how much of that is something that needs to be done with real-world test and validation versus what do you think you can do with simulation? And can simulation replace a lot or all of some of those types of things?

Speaker 1

Yeah, so simulation is a very broad set of technologies, everything from replaying data and kind of ad-libbing what the actions are to generating the full synthetic perception system and everything in between. And we use a combination of all those tools to do this validation. so this is where we're seeing some real lift from generative techniques so we can take a real-world scene and augment that in certain interesting ways we have a process by which we will go ground that simulation with reality to have conviction that we're not just playing a video game we're actually playing you know operating in a world a simulated world that's reflective of reality and then we can use that to get to the point where we're now confident that this thing's actually working and go release the 70,000 pound truck down the road One of the things that we do not believe in is kind of one-shot YOLO, right? Like, oh, we saw it work once, cool, let's let it go, right? That's not how you deliver a safe, real product into the world. That's how you cause real damage.

Mark Delaney, Analyst — Goldman Sachs

I think it dovetails well with my next question, which is on your approach to AI more generally and obviously guided by safety. But you've written a lot and talked a lot about verifiable AI. Tell us more about what that means for Aurora.

Speaker 1

Yeah, verifiable AI means making sure we are using the most cutting-edge techniques, but ensuring that we have the tools and the architecture so that we can have conviction that they're actually going to behave the way we want. Again, when you're driving a 70,000-pound thing down the road at 70 miles an hour, it's not okay to have an oopsie moment. And if you're really just going to throw data at one end, and train a model and kick it out in the road and, you know, talk about the magic of AI, you're destined to have these problems, right? And we see it constantly in the entertaining output we get from LLMs, a massive amount of value and opportunity there, but they brain fart, for lack of a better word for it, pretty regularly. We just can't afford that. And so for us, verifiable AI is this combination of how do we take these modern techniques, use them but put them in a sufficient box so we can actually test and validate them and that we can put constraints on how they operate such that we know that the behavior is going to be good.

Mark Delaney, Analyst — Goldman Sachs

Yeah, said another way, you're not an end-to-end AI proponent.

Speaker 1

No. I think that, again, the tools are super useful, but a black box between sensors and pedals where you just hope that the outcome is always going to be right is a recipe for disaster.

Mark Delaney, Analyst — Goldman Sachs

I know you and I have spoken about how important this might be for regulations and talking to regulators because you can point to specific things and why your software made the choices it did. And I know you're engaged right now, I think, with some regulators, including in California. Maybe talk around some of the key regulatory things that Aurora is working through.

Speaker 1

Yeah, so we continue to be really happy with the regulatory environment in the United States. It's a giant market, of course, and it's an important market for us, and continuing to see really positive support both at the state and federal level. Recently, California put in place regulations that will allow automated trucks on the road. This has been a many-year journey to get there, and so we're excited to see those. We've already received our testing permit. We expect it will take some time to move through that regulatory process. I think the DOT in California is being appropriately careful. And so we'll just continue to work through that, work with them to get the technology unlocked in the state of California here. And then at the federal level, again, we're seeing, you know, tremendous support and traction. You know, in the surface reauthorization bill this year, this explicit engagement around automated vehicles and automated trucking. And so we're seeing really positive traction there. And, you know, the Secretary of Transportation, Secretary Duffy, has really taken a step forward with this innovation agenda, ensuring we maintain safety but continue to allow America to innovate in this space.

Mark Delaney, Analyst — Goldman Sachs

You know, I think one of the other angles there was around potentially needing to warn other cars if there is a breakdown in the trucks on the side of the road. I mean, this is a longstanding regulation, but the existing one was like a person has to walk and put these layers in cones. Where are you with the warning lights and more of a digital solution?

Speaker 1

Yeah, so back in the day, somebody thought, hey, it'd be good if people put triangles or flares behind cars. And there was no data to support it, but, you know, it seems like not a bad idea. And that got turned into regulation. And so obviously when we don't have a person in the truck, we could find ways to do this. We can imagine a little dropper on the back of the truck that drops triangles or flares. But we prefer to do something more rational, and that is turn on blinking lights. This is what police vehicles do. This is what other emergency responders do. This is what construction vehicles do. This is what tow trucks do to indicate there's something here. Don't hit me. So we made the deep, bold, innovative step of saying let's do that for trucks. And we've used it. and we've collected the data now to show that it's actually as effective, if not more effective, than, you know, dropping cones. And so we have an exemption from the DOT to move forward with this. And we look forward to having a more permanent kind of common-sense solution for this. Very helpful.

Mark Delaney, Analyst — Goldman Sachs

I want to talk on the ramp. You already said earlier on track for the 20 to 25 trucks by the end of this quarter and 200 by the end of the year. But you also mentioned, you know, production is difficult early stage, Welcome to physical things. Maybe just talk about how you're working with supply chain. Actually, the theme of this conference has been certain components are pretty tight right now. So anything you'd point to as you're working through that, Ram?

Speaker 1

Yeah, I think this is one of the things where we have a really strong advantage relative to competitors in the space. The part that gets the headlines is the very cool and technically complicated and kind of sexy AI driving stuff. And we are very good at that. uh we're best in world with that but for that to actually go out into the world and do something you need the physical parts to put it on the truck and this is where our first generation hardware was stuff we made in-house we knew how to test it we were confident in the safety of it but we could produce that at the scale of tens of things the generation two hardware that we dislaunch we work with fabronet which is a global contract manufacturer that we can produce at the scale of 1,500 units. We talked about Roush earlier and the supply chain. We have to upfit those trucks to add bi-wire capability to them and add our vehicles or our Aurora driver kit onto that. That allows us to get to a scale that's unprecedented in automated trucking and will allow us to bring customers along to kind of allow them to experience it, to start to build this into fleets and actually really gain significant traction and ultimately generate meaningful revenue. And then our third-generation hardware, we're co-developing with Amovio, and that is produced at scales of tens of thousands of units. And that is where we get to true scale and true inflection in the business. And that path that we've been on of simultaneously developing the first, second, and third-generation hardware has been critical to enable us to go scale. And so for us, this is gigantic, right? We think we have a multi-year lead on the kind of the hard tech AI driving capability, we think we have perhaps even larger multi-year lead on the supply chain and hardware side of this, where if you do not have a path to produce the hardware, I don't even know what you're doing. And we're clearly, you know, well ahead on that. So super excited there. Very helpful.

Mark Delaney, Analyst — Goldman Sachs

And as you kind of exit this year with the 200 trucks, you further ramp into 2027. As you do ramp in 27, maybe talk about the business model in terms of do you haul the cargo as well and its transportation as a service, or do you do more just the virtual driver and its driver as a service next year?

Speaker 1

Yeah, so it's going to be very exciting. Today we're operating a handful of trucks. We will be operating 20 to 25 trucks driverly by the end of the month, and then we will be adding 20 trucks a week as we get into Q4. Just the scale of that growth in this space is, again, it's super exciting. It is turning a corner. Today we operate in what we call transportation of service, which means we own and operate the trucks. We operate them for carriers. So we don't go out and bid with shippers. That's not our business. We are not a trucking company. We operate under contract for companies like Werner, Schneider, Hirschbach, Federal Express. Detmar, and several others, where we're providing capability for them, this allows them to experience the benefits of automated driving, to see these trucks in action, you know, and get a way to have a relatively low-risk opportunity to learn about the technology and then commit to it. As we go into 2027, we will transition to driver-as-a-service. And this is where customers go from having us own and operate the asset to leaning into their core strengths, being able to own, operate, to maintain those assets and pay us a subscription fee for driving it. And this is the long-term model we've been talking about for our business for the last several years. We want to be asset light. We want to focus on what we do best in the world, which is build that driving capability and allow our customers to excel and benefit from that technology but run their business in the way they're used to. And so we had a very exciting announcement earlier this year with Hirschberg where we signed an MOU with them for 500 tractors where we will provide the driver service they will own and operate the tractor. And we continue to have further conversation with other customers for that volume in 27 and beyond.

Mark Delaney, Analyst — Goldman Sachs

And from the conversations you're having or the MOUs you've even signed, is your sense that customers are willing to do the driver as a service model on upfitted trucks? Yes. And they want this model, right?

Speaker 1

If you are a major carrier in this country, you see your ability to own, operate, maintain that asset as a competitive advantage. That is what you do best in world along with the customer service and the rest of the operational rigor that you put around it and so for for us being able to slot into the business that they already have their model today is they buy the asset they pay someone to drive it for them and they do the rest of the work around that that's what our business model will look like to them and that's that's exciting and compelling and yes folks are interested in these uh roush outfit international trucks one of the really interesting parts of the business model on driver of the service at least in the longer term is that not only do you get paid per mile, but you're going to pay on cost per mile with this Gen 3 and with Immovio.

Mark Delaney, Analyst — Goldman Sachs

But in the 27 timeframe, if you do driver as a service, do you still have that structure where you pay cost per mile, or is it going to be a little different for a period of time?

Speaker 1

No, and maybe I can just unpack that for a moment. So the partnership we have with Immovio is this kind of first-of-its-kind agreement where we're co-developing with Immovio the hardware that will make up our third-generation kit. But the economics of that are what we call hardware as a service. So they're investing up front to develop it. They'll put in place the manufacturing capability to manufacture it, and then they will finance the hardware, and then we pay them on a per-mile basis for the utilization of that hardware. So this is great for us because it means that we don't have this massive up front capital expenditure that we have to carry out our books to support our customers owning and operating these assets. It's great for our friends at Amovio because for decades, these companies have tried to get into value-based pricing instead of the should-cost pricing that all the OEMs beat them down to. And so it will create a really interesting, significant revenue stream for them. It creates a really interesting, significant revenue stream for us. And so it's very much aligned. And by the way, it's 100% aligned with our customers because the more that truck drives, the more money they make. So all the way down the stack, everybody makes more money. the more these things operate, and so we're all aligned. Now, with our second-generation hardware, we don't have that structure. So these we will have to have on our balance sheet and finance them in some way. Okay.

Mark Delaney, Analyst — Goldman Sachs

All right. That's very helpful. But a very interesting longer-term business model, in my opinion.

Speaker 1

And we have to go through this phase to get to that phase, right? It's important to realize that if you're a Tier 1 manufacturer, you don't get out of bed for less than 10,000, generally tens of thousands of units. And so to bridge the gap from onesies of units to thousands of units, you have to do something. And that's what we've been able to do with this Fabronat partnership in the interim.

Mark Delaney, Analyst — Goldman Sachs

You mentioned Hirschbach already. You've got the MOU there for 500 trucks. Any sense on timing as to when the full 500 could be realized?

Speaker 1

What we've said is those will be realized over 27 and 28.

Mark Delaney, Analyst — Goldman Sachs

Helpful. And then you're doing some upfitting now with Roush. Roush, you mentioned that ramping toward 20 trucks a week, so obviously some volume opportunity there, but you also have ambitions to integrate Lineside. You have formal announcements with both PACCAR and Volvo.

Speaker 1

What sort of that opportunity, what would that look like as you move to Lineside integration? And it's exciting because it's more than ambitions. We're executing on this. So with Volvo, they are producing vehicles Lineside today. They've announced that in Q1 of 27, they will begin operating driverless trucks. Those will be Aurora-driven trucks, and they expect to have 300-plus of them on the road by the end of the year. And then as our Gen 3 hardware comes online, those will be integrated line-side as well. And that's where they get very excited because that's now series production scale and off to the races. So we're super excited about that. And that has been a multi-year investment of effort from both companies. It's hard to understate how hard it is to bring a fundamentally new technology into one of these vehicle manufacturing lines, and the effort we've put in to do that has been meaningful, and it's been meaningful by this tremendous partner we have with Volvo, and so we're very excited about that. With PACCAR, as you probably all know, PACCAR does not share timelines on any product they're going to ship, and so what we can say there is that we're working with them to line-side install the third-generation hardware, and we expect that to come to market.

Mark Delaney, Analyst — Goldman Sachs

Okay, helpful. And given that you're currently working with international trucks and not fitting those with Roush, would it make sense to do one of these line-side integrations with international at some point?

Speaker 1

We would love to at some point, right? The approach we're taking right now is one that allows us to safely control the timelines to deliver those trucks and allow us to meet the customer demand we have today and demonstrate this technology out in the world operating safely. And so it's been a really important tool for us, and it's one we will continue to use going forward. And we're capacitized for 1,000 units a year or 20 units a week at this point. We can imagine scaling that up should we find, you know, appropriate reason to do so. In the long term, we do see value in having this line site installed with International, and that would be great, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Mark Delaney, Analyst — Goldman Sachs

We spoke a bit on some of the different generations of your hardware stack that you're bringing to Gen 2 now and then Gen 3 next year. Could you talk more around what that means for cost reduction? I think 50% for Gen 2, if I'm not mistaken, but talk about Gen 2 cost downs and even what Gen 3 might look like.

Speaker 1

Yeah, so when we moved from Gen 1 to Gen 2, we reduced the cost of the build materials by about a factor of two, but we also extended the durability of the product by a factor of three, two to three, somewhere in that range. And so when you think about the amortization of that cost over the life of the million-mile life of the product, that's a pretty big deal. And now as we move to the Amovio-produced third-generation hardware kit, that will be another significant step down on order of a factor of two or so.

Mark Delaney, Analyst — Goldman Sachs

And I think in the last range of all you said you're already starting to work with Amovio and getting ready for that next year? I mean, are things going to land?

Speaker 1

Yeah, it's not like getting started with these automotive programs or many-year programs, as you know. And so we've been working with them for, I don't know, five years or so at this point. And we're well along in that program and continue to expect to launch that in the back half of next year. And that, by the way, is another superpower for us on this supply chain side, right? And for a company like us, we are very good at the system design. We're very good at the automated driving part of this. But managing a supply chain is a whole additional skill set. Doing significant DFM at scale is another skill set. And this is a thing that we're smart people. We could go hire a bunch of great people and do it ourselves. Or we could lean into a partner who has aligned incentives and work with them and do it in a way that is much more capital-efficient and delivers that exactly on the objectives we're trying to together. And so we're thrilled about this. This is a big deal, and it's, you know, Philip and the team at Amovio are tremendous, and, you know, we've kind of grown together over the last several years.

Mark Delaney, Analyst — Goldman Sachs

That's good to get that update. I guess speaking of partnerships, Uber's been a partnership of yours. They've owned equity, part of the tech team that you brought over years ago from Uber. Also, I think Uber Freight as well. They did sell some stock. It's public. So I don't know if you can share anything around how that partnership is going and any changes given what they did.

Speaker 1

I appreciate you bringing it up. This is one of those questions. So maybe just take it head on. So the question is like, hey, Uber is a big shareholder. Do they know something I don't? And so they're dumping it because they know that. And the answer is no, like definitively no. Uber has been clear. The management team over there, Dara, has been very clear that they had put a lot of money into our partnership and were a significant shareholder, and they need to recycle that capital from us into their kind of automated robo-taxi fragmentation strategy to ensure that there are many players to support their marketplace on the AV side of it. So it makes total sense. They've been clear and transparent about it. I continue to very much appreciate Dara, continue to very much appreciate the relationship we have with Uber and Uber Freight. I'm also actually kind of happy to see it happen. It sucks those days. But the fact that we're taking this large shareholder and dispersing those shares out into folks who want to hold the stock, And if you look at the quality of the shareholder base we have, it is awesome. And so it had to happen at some point. You know, because I like Dara, I think you should have held it longer and, like, actually made more money off the shares. But, you know, for everyone who's come into the stock, I think this is great. And it allows us to diversify the shareholder base into something that is actually long-term sustainable. Because at some point, you know, they're not Berkshire Hathaway. At some point, they're going to divest it. Let's do it now.

Mark Delaney, Analyst — Goldman Sachs

Get it out of the way. helpful context um i want to talk a bit about the business model and pricing uh at the 2024 investor day aurora spoke about how asts on their the driver as a service model could be 65 to 85 cents yeah obviously there's been a lot of inflation in the whole economy and including in wages for for truck drivers so you know you think about the economics of the business any thoughts you can share around where pricing could land yeah yeah we um i think the last time we shared something around pricing.

Speaker 1

We said we expect it to be $0.85 plus per mile in driver as a service. And we continue to see that moving in a higher direction, right? The cost of labor is going up. It will continue to. This government has taken, this administration has taken a stand about removing non-domiciled commercial drivers from the market that further tightens what was already an undersupply of drivers. And so we expect this to continue to go up. So we, you know, we look forward to having the Aurora driver in market working side by side with people driving trucks. And we continue to see that human labor cost as a very significant pricing umbrella for our product.

Mark Delaney, Analyst — Goldman Sachs

Yeah, I mean, I think some of the data you've shared, and it's third party data, but driver wages and benefits alone are north of a dollar per mile and have been increasing.

Speaker 1

Yeah, our best estimate today is that, you know, based on HRI, which is the American Trucking Research Institute, that, you know, direct wages plus indirect are somewhere around $1.18 a mile. And so when you think as a customer of Aurora, the cost of the driver that we can provide, the fact that we will improve fuel economy for you. Today we're seeing 10% improvement in fuel efficiency, like for like between our automated vehicles and when our humans are driving the trucks. Given the cost of diesel today, that's actually a pretty big deal. The improvement in road safety that we expect you'll see, and then the fact that you'll be able to utilize this asset twice as much, All of that means that this will be transformational for your business as a customer. And we look forward to really helping our customers realize that benefit.

Mark Delaney, Analyst — Goldman Sachs

Autonomous technology, both from the software and hardware side, can be applicable to a lot of different areas. You guys have spoken about the potential to do robo-taxis. You also have an interesting LiDAR. Some LiDAR companies are even taking their semiconductor chips and trying to repurpose those into other areas, like into the data center. So we'd love to get your thoughts. to know, you probably talked about this for an hour. But any kind of things where you may think about your software or hardware being applicable to other areas that you can point to?

Speaker 1

So let me begin by saying trucking the U.S. is a trillion dollar market. And we are well ahead in that market. And we are going to go play to win in that market, right? Shame on us if we squander that opportunity because we can create an immense amount of social good, an immense amount of economic value and not a lot of value for our shareholders and customers, right? So let us go win that and make sure we don't take that off the ball there. At the same time, the capabilities we've built as a company to understand the world, to validate safety-critical software, and if you think about an 80,000-pound truck driving down the road at 70 miles an hour, that is pretty freaking safety-critical, and be able to take that process and tools and all the rest of the infrastructure we have and point it to other applications is super exciting, right? And whether that is look at, you know, medium duty trucks, you know, box vans and box trucks, or whether that is go look at robotaxi, or whether that is looking mining and agriculture or aviation and drones, like there are a lot of places where we can go find ways to take this competence we've developed and apply it. And we're going to start doing that. And of course, we're going to be looking at international markets as well that are very relevant. But we are not going to take our eye off the ball of delivering the product promise here in the U.S. and making sure we take every advantage we can of the lead we've invested and built. Okay. Makes a lot of sense.

Mark Delaney, Analyst — Goldman Sachs

Maybe talk about funding the company. You are still cash flow negative. You talked about a path to cash flow positive, but how long might that take and any sense of the capital that may be needed in the meantime?

Speaker 1

Yeah, we feel like we're in a very strong position. We had a strong balance sheet, I think $1.2 billion on the balance sheet at the end of last quarter. That position is as well to go win in this space, we think. We continue to expect to get to free cash flow positive on a run rate basis in 28. And so we feel very strong about our position.

Mark Delaney, Analyst — Goldman Sachs

Well, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention you have an investor day coming up in just a couple of weeks. I'll be seeing you shortly in Texas, but any things you'd point to that investors should be looking out for as we go to Dallas?

Speaker 1

It's been a couple of years since we've hosted one. We're very excited to have folks out there. I think we'll take an opportunity to share a bit more about the business. We will be offering folks there an opportunity to come ride in a driverless truck, which is pretty darn cool. So tune in and look forward to seeing you then.

Mark Delaney, Analyst — Goldman Sachs

I've got my slot on the agenda, so I'm really looking forward to doing it. I mean, you and I were talking, the last one you did in Pittsburgh was kind of on the test track, and it was really fascinating to see it from standing on the side, but this one will actually be doing it ourselves.

Speaker 1

It was fun, right? I still remember walking up to our test track, and you see these two giant trucks driving around, and it kind of felt like swimming with whales. It's a whole other level of real once you get in the truck and it's on the road. And when you do that and there's nobody behind the seat and it's just and knowing that this is happening day in and day out is a big deal. And I think it's going to be it's a lot of fun. Right. And I'm still an eight year old at heart. You see a big truck. That's pretty darn cool. And then you get into it and it just goes. It's spectacular.

Mark Delaney, Analyst — Goldman Sachs

Well, I can't wait to see it in a few weeks. Chris, really appreciate you joining yet again this year. Appreciate it. Thanks so much.