Self-driving expertise developer Outrider has raised $73 million in a brand new funding spherical.
Outrider, which makes an autonomous system designed for truck yard operations, plans to make use of the funds from the collection C spherical so as to add to its suite of autonomous and security expertise merchandise. It would rent extra employees domestically and overseas.
The funding spherical permits Outrider, which is headquartered in Golden, Colo., to serve prospects throughout the big package deal delivery, retail, e-commerce, shopper packaged items, grocery, manufacturing and intermodal segments of the freight trade.
The brand new funding will speed up the corporate’s work with EV yard truck producers, Outrider stated.
Outrider’s collection C funding spherical was led by FM Capital, in Boulder, Colo., which has a monitor document of investing in automotive and transportation startups.
“Outrider has addressed all of the items — expertise, security, operations and help — wanted to deploy a dependable, industrial-grade system at scale,” FM Capital Managing Accomplice Mark Norman stated. “The corporate is a case examine in bringing superior robotics and autonomy expertise to market.”
Different notable traders embrace the Abu Dhabi Funding Authority and NVenture, Nvidia’s enterprise capital arm.
“Our confidence in Outrider is predicated on its technical and industrial management in yard automation for absolutely autonomous autos to combine fluidly into real-world buyer operations,” NVenture’s head Mohamed Siddeek stated. “The elemental processing pipeline for autonomous autos may be utilized to all types of autonomous and robotics techniques — a key space of focus for Nvidia.”
The funding spherical additionally attracted B37 Ventures, Lineage Logistics’ enterprise capital division Lineage Ventures, Sumitomo Corp.’s enterprise arm Presidio Ventures and ROBO International Ventures.
Henrik Christensen, a founding member of ROBO International’s advisory board and Qualcomm chair of robotics on the College of California-San Diego, has joined Outrider as a board adviser.
Current traders taking part on this spherical embrace Koch Disruptive Applied sciences and New Enterprise Associates.
So far, Outrider has raised $191 million in financing. The corporate, based in 2017 by Andrew Smith, a 2022 Automotive Information all-star, contains industrial warehouse large Prologis, Evolv Ventures and Kraft Heinz’s $100 million enterprise fund amongst its early traders.
This newest infusion of money comes on the heels of the debut of Outrider’s TrailerConnect system, which robotically connects electrical and pressurized brake strains to trailers and container chassis.
TrailerConnect makes use of robotic arms to find and establish totally different connection patterns amongst trailers. It depends on software-based algorithms, {hardware} and sensors built-in into the robotic arms, and is a part of Outrider’s objective to offer self-driving electrical vehicles to automate freight yards.
Outrider stated its buyer fleets collectively symbolize greater than 20 % of all yard vehicles working in North America. Since 2019, the corporate has labored with its prospects in joint product testing and pilot operations.
In 2021, Outrider teamed up with shopper packaged items large Georgia-Pacific to equip its Elmwood, In poor health., distribution heart with autos that accomplished 1,000 autonomous zero-emission trailer strikes.