Embark, a self-driving truck enterprise led by 25-year-old CEO Alex Rodrigues, introduced a deal to go public through SPAC on Wednesday.

San Francisco-based Embark plans to mix in a $5.2 billion cope with Northern Genesis Acquisition Corp. II, a particular function acquisition firm, to turn out to be a publicly traded inventory. The driverless tech firm expects to lift about $614 million in gross money proceeds, together with a $200 million personal funding from Knight-Swift Transportation Holdings, Sequoia Capital and Tiger World, amongst others.

The proceeds are anticipated to completely fund Embark’s enterprise via 2024. It is the latest self-driving truck company making a deal to go public in latest months. Rivals corresponding to Plus, previously often called Plus AI, introduced its personal SPAC deal final month, and TuSimple Holdings, took a extra conventional preliminary public providing route and began buying and selling in April.

Amazon positioned an order for as much as 1,000 autonomous truck methods from Plus and bought the choice to purchase a stake within the Embark competitor, in keeping with a filing. Bloomberg first reported on that deal. Embark faces extra competitors from autonomous corporations entering into freight hauling together with Alphabet-backed Waymo, and different enterprise funded startups like Kodiak and Aurora.

Based in 2016, Embark prides itself on being the primary to check self-driving vans on public roads within the U.S., Rodrigues informed CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Wednesday. He added that the corporate licenses its personal software program on a per-mile foundation and companions with main carriers in a approach that is distinct from different market gamers.

“We’re capable of scale up actually, actually rapidly by leveraging the buying energy and the operational experience of a few of the largest carriers within the nation,” Rodrigues stated.

Embark is at the moment operating an inner growth fleet with security drivers within the automobiles. “It is actually a bit of our security technique, however the know-how is there,” Rodrigues stated. The driving force would not have to the touch the wheel shifting between cities and switch factors.

“Knight-Swift believes that the simplest solution to scale autonomous truck know-how is by having carriers and their current drivers function the vans in service of shippers, leveraging the ecosystem’s current strengths and relationships,” David Jackson, CEO of Knight-Swift, stated in a press release. “We’ve got chosen to companion with and spend money on Embark as a result of they’ve championed this technique and demonstrated their means to execute towards a transparent technical and operational roadmap to commercialize it at scale.”

Rodrigues, who began Embark with chief know-how officer Brandon Moak, expects 2024 to 2025 to be “only the start of the inflection level” for the corporate. He famous that trucking is a $700 billion trade in the US. He additionally expressed confidence within the SPAC deal.

“On the know-how aspect, that is one thing we’re very aware of,” Rodrigues stated. “On the enterprise aspect, that is positively one thing that is going to be new to me, gonna be new to the corporate. However we really feel actually assured, as a result of I’ve an distinctive group and I’ve an distinctive group of advisors, of us like Sequoia Capital, of us just like the Northern Genesis group who’re going to be right here with us as we construct this firm. We have seen this occur many instances earlier than.”

Rodrigues and Moak met and collaborated with whereas learning mechatronics engineering on the College of Waterloo in Ontario. They constructed Canada’s first self-driving car, an autonomous golf cart named “Marvin,” out of Rodrigues’ storage.

Embark, now with about 120 full-time staff, is partnering with Anheuser-Busch InBev, Werner Enterprises and different main shippers and cargo haulers to ensure that autonomous methods work throughout the rising floor freight trade. Whereas the corporate has declined to debate Embark’s paying purchasers, CNBC previously reported that Amazon, for one, has used Embark for some cargo-hauling on U.S. highways.

— CNBC’s Lora Kolodny and Reuters contributed to this report.