Autonomous vehicle technology may no longer be the fuel that drives the hype machine. But companies applying the technology to agricultural, commercial and logistics applications continue to attract venture capital.
Take Outrider, a Golden, Colorado startup developing self-driving electric garden trucks.
Distribution yards are the nerve center of the supply chain. It’s where all of those goods (like orders from Amazon and other e-commerce companies) make the transition from long-haul trucks to warehouses and eventually to the consumer. Today’s workers use diesel-powered yard trucks to move trailers full of goods around the yard, as well as to and from the loading docks.
Outrider has developed a self-contained system that includes an electric yard truck, software to manage operations, and site infrastructure. While humans may still be needed in the distribution yard, the autonomous system handles most of the work, including hitching and unhitching trailers, connecting and disconnecting trailer brake lines, and monitoring locations. of the trailers.
The revenue potential of this system (there are some 400,000 distribution yards in the US alone) has drawn the attention of a number of investors. Outrider recently closed a $73 million Series C round led by FM Capital and attracted new investors from the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and NVentures, NVIDIA’s venture capital group. New investors B37 Ventures, Lineage Ventures, Presidio Ventures, the venture arm of Sumitomo Corporation, and ROBO Global Ventures also joined along with existing backers Koch Disruptive Technologies and New Enterprise Associates.
Outrider has raised $191 million since its founding in 2017 under the Azevtec name.
The company has made some progress since its last raise in the fall of 2020. Outrider founder and CEO Andrew Smith told TechCrunch that the yard trucks have new hardware designed to handle harsh environments, including robotic arms. . Outrider has 20 stand-alone systems in use at customer sites and its test facilities as the company finalizes the system’s final capabilities and proprietary security mechanisms, Smith said.
These final adjustments to the system will conclude in 2023, he added. From there, the focus will be launching commercial operations with its customers, which include Georgia Pacific and other unnamed companies that have invested in joint product testing and pilot operations since 2019. Smith said Outrider’s customers represent more 20% of all yard trucks operating in North America.
The new funds will be used to hire in the US and internationally (beyond its 175-person workforce) and transition testing and validation to commercial operations at scale, Smith said.
“It is one thing to have a vehicle that drives autonomously, and another thing to create a truly industrial system that can operate in a hostile environment for several years, from 20 to 24 hours a day, 365 days a year,” Smith said. Production of the system and implementation of these final capabilities will allow us to scale to thousands of systems running Outrider software in the coming years.”
