Self driving company Aurora makes Nasdaq debut

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The Aurora founders celebrate at the bell at the Nasdaq. | Image credit: Aurora

In another highly-anticipated IPO, self-driving technology company Aurora Innovation (AUR) made it’s Nasdaq debut today. The company merged in October with Reinvent Technology Partners Y (RTPY), a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) led by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Zynga founder Mark Pincus.

The company started trading today on the Nasdaq Stock Market under the ticker symbol AUR. It opened at $11.25 a share, but fell to a close of $9.60 after trading 3.5M shares. This result gives it a market cap of about $12.5 billion, which is up from the valuation of about $10 billion it had after a venture round ($400M) last December.

Aurora was one of the first companies to secure authorization for autonomous vehicle testing in Pennsylvania, where the company headquarters is now located. The company develops autonomous driving solutions for both passenger vehicles and long-haul cargo trucking.

We covered Aurora’s partnership with FedEx where the two companies tested autonomous long-haul transportation in Texas.

In January 2021, Aurora acquired Uber’s self driving unit, Advanced Technologies Group. In that deal, Uber took a 26% ownership stake in Aurora with a $400 million investment into the company.

A huge market opportunity

Aurora sees a huge market opportunity as outlined in this market overview from their November 2021 investor presentation. | Credit: Aurora Innovation

Aurora sent an announcement this afternoon: “As of today, we’re thrilled to continue on our mission to deliver the benefits of self-driving technology safely, quickly and broadly as a publicly traded company on NASDAQ (AUR). Aurora works at the intersection of rigorous engineering and applied machine learning to address one of the most challenging, important and interesting opportunities of our generation: transforming the way people and goods move.”

About Aurora

Aurora (Nasdaq: AUR) is delivering the benefits of self-driving technology safely, quickly, and broadly. Founded in 2017 by experts in the self-driving industry, Aurora is revolutionizing transportation – making it safer, increasingly accessible, and more reliable and efficient than ever before. Its flagship product, the Aurora Driver, is a platform that brings together software, hardware, and data services, to autonomously operate passenger vehicles, light commercial vehicles, and heavy-duty trucks. Aurora is partnered with industry leaders across the transportation ecosystem including Toyota, Uber, Volvo, FedEx, and PACCAR. Aurora tests its vehicles in the Bay Area, Pittsburgh, and Texas and has offices in those areas as well as in Bozeman, MT; Seattle, WA; Louisville, CO; and Wixom, MI. To learn more, visit www.aurora.tech.