AUR is worth $13B. KDK is worth $750M. Both run driverless semis, and KDK targets highway driver out in December... ($KDK DD)

AUR is worth $13B. KDK is worth $750M. Both run driverless semis, and KDK targets highway driver out in December... ($KDK DD) **Positions:** 50,000 shares at $3.90 - will hold to a $5bn - $10bn market cap **Image processing almost complete. Refresh the page to finish loading.**Refresh [Loaded to a full tittie](https://preview.redd.it/5h5huu74qvph1.jpg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9607e7091dac3c2e6e5acc26a08e5c86314453be) *I am not your financial advisor, I am your enabler - and I will continue to load up on this asymmetric af opportunity. I am also the lunatic willingly holding this into* ***both*** *a share unlock and upcoming dilution.* **The question to ask yourself as you read this, chant it with me now =** "is AUR worth 17x KDK?" **TLDR** for the attention span impaired * $AUR (Aurora) = $13B. $KDK (KodiakAI) = $750M * Kodiak is the only company on earth that's sold a driverless semi-truck to a customer who owns and runs it themselves. 35 trucks, 40,000+ paid driverless hours, 21 months using it, with a clean FMCSA record. That customer went from 10 trucks...to 35, now committed to 100 in 2027 * Both CEOs came off the same Google self-driving team * Driver-out on Texas highways for KDK committed for December. Safety-case readiness 84 > 86 > 91 > **93%** in August * Nine firms cover it, not one single one has a sell and average at $10.70 * **Risks are very fucking real:** shares unlock this Sept 24th, a raise is coming, read the bad news at the bottom The stock is down 67% in a year, mainly because financing in May priced 30% below market blew up the stock, which was good news for me in many ways In the meantime = they got onto PACCAR's analyst slides, signed a Bosch deal that makes OEM integration easier, expanded Atlas and took highway readiness from 84% to 93% **Physical AI is the next mania sector (imo)** Our dear leader Jensen Huang called autonomous driving physical AI's first killer app at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference on 10th September (not humanoids doing fucking backflips around a warehouse) The opportunity to invest here is almost bare on the trucking side, you have 2 picks - AUR and KDK. **Where Aurora is clearly ahead** I'm not dumb (maybe some think I am), but credit where it's due Aurora went driver out on public highways before Kodiak, runs a bigger fleet, has $1.2bn in the bank (but burns $1bn a year...), and has OEM deals with PACCAR and Volvo that Kodiak doesn't On the OEM deals however = none of them are exclusive, PACCAR runs a multi-partner strategy, and Volvo is running Waabi alongside Aurora PACCAR has dragged its feet from the get go. We're four years in, they asked Aurora to put a human observer back in, and Feight (CEO) still says they have "no plans to take the driver out at this point" More importantly when it comes to OEM's, **factory integration is generally a 2028+ story** for everybody (Volvo aren't going to start churning out thousands of trucks on day one for AUR in 2027, they plan for something around 300 across the year) Meaning AUR sure as fuck isn't worth 17x more value imo as things stand **The rest of the sector** Everyone in this sector tests on public highways with a safety driver. But the important thing is "is it driverless and is someone paying for it", and **there are two players** currently in this game regards, and you guessed it: Aurora, and Kodiak |Company|Valuation|Driver-out class-8 freight, for a paying customer| |:-|:-|:-| || |Aurora|$13B|**Yes** \- since 2025; Gen2 trucks empty-cab from July 2026| |**Waabi**|$3.5B (private round)|Not yet - supervised testing| |**Stack AV**|$1B raised from SoftBank in one round|Not yet| |**Torc**|91% Daimler-owned; $660M a year of spend|Not yet - driver-out proven on a closed course, public roads targeted 2027| |**Plus**|$800M (attempting to list via a 2nd SPAC, this will de-spac this time imo)|Not yet - supervised testing| |**Bot Auto**|$45M raised; valuation undisclosed|Yes, but fuck all - a paid driverless Houston-Dallas run in April, on a fleet of about 8 trucks| |**Kodiak**|**$750M**|**Yes** \- 21 months, customer-owned fleet; highway driver-out coming December 2026| There's also a lot of China baggage associated with Plus and Bot Auto. Infer from that what you will. **Both CEOs at AUR and KDK are from the same Google team** Chris Urmson (AUR) was running Google's self-driving project. Don Burnette (KDK) was a software tech lead on the same project from 2010 to 2016. Urmson left in 2016 and started Aurora. Burnette had already gone to co-found Otto, which Uber bought inside a year for a reported $680M, then he started Kodiak in 2018. Luckily Burnette is also charasmatic af **Kodiak have spent 21 months in the Permian** The customer being Atlas Energy (AESI), the biggest sand supplier in the Permian. The trucks run West Texas lease roads and public routes - meaning despite the usual "the roads aren't real" bullshit, there is oncoming traffic, intersections, some pedestrians, rules of the road are in force. Then you have the hostile environment, dust whacking the sensors, heat cooking the electronics etc, as Burnette said, moving to a highway is a "cakewalk" in a YouTube vid. They're not running empty either, far far from it - [triple trailers at 135+ tons](https://kodiak.ai/news/driverless-triple-trailers-permian-basin) From Q2 calls: * **35 driverless trucks**, nobody in the cab, 24/7 * 40,000+ paid driverless hours, up 71% in one quarter * 20,000+ cumulative loads, 300,000+ tons moved last quarter * Atlas's own numbers = 4,600+ autonomous deliveries in Q2, up 70% sequentially, 176 loads in a single day in July * Entire well sites now served **exclusively** by Kodiak trucks Atlas clearly likes working with Kodiak, it's gone from **10 trucks, then 35, now committed to 100** through mid-2027, public roads targeted mid next year. They're also switching brands mid programme, PACCAR built to Daimler-built Western Stars, with Kodiak porting the whole driverless operation across OEM platforms this quarter. Every big fleet in America runs multiple brands for obvious reasons, and this proves Kodiak can handle that multi OEM integration. The FMCSA record through all of it = absolutely a-ok clean **December = driver out on Texas highways for Kodiak** And this is the big one my fellow regards. Kodiak has been running autonomous highway freight with a safety driver since 2019, meaning daily commercial loads across the southern US, on lanes like Dallas-Houston and Dallas-Atlanta, for J.B. Hunt, Werner, C.R. England and others. Over **3 million autonomous miles** disclosed by September 2025, after which they switched the reported metric to driverless hours and loads In totality we have seven years of supervised highway miles, and the Permian alongside this, and December is where those two things meet as a wonderful baby being born They've guided to driver-out on Texas highways by year-end on every.single.call. They haven't named the lane, but it's fairly obviously (to me anyway) Dallas-Houston, where they already haul freight out of a Ryder truckport The Autonomy Readiness Measure tracks the percentage of safety-case claims closed: 84% in February, 86% in April, 91% in July, **93% at the end of August**. The [September 8th update](https://kodiak.ai/news/driverless-long-haul-on-track-arm-93) reaffirmed the year-end launch outright and said remaining work is "concentrated on final engineering verification and validation activities" * Feb to April: 1.0ish points a month * April to July: 1.67 a month * July to August: **2.0 in a single month** * Required to close the last 7 points by year-end: **1.75 a month** **Texas on its own is enough to achieve my objectives** Texas is the largest trucking state in America, something around 150,000-250,000 class-8 trucks. 5,000 of them is $300-500M of recurring revenue = a multi-billion company. The 2027/28 path adds Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Georgia - all permissive states... **Who else is lined up in the sales funnel** (and these are the ones we know of) * **Roehl Transport** has hauled Kodiak freight on the Dallas-Houston corridor since spring, now five roundtrips a week. Top 30 carrier and a five-time winner of the ATA President's Trophy, which is the industry's highest safety award... * **J.B. Hunt**: 150+ loads, 120,000+ miles, including Dallas-Atlanta runs going 24 hours a day for four straight days (figures per the 2025 listing deck) * **Werner**: partnered since 2022, 250+ loads and 200,000+ miles per the same deck, an SVP on Kodiak's advisory council * **C.R. England, Martin Brower** (McDonald's supply chain), **10 Roads Express**, **IKEA** \- named partners or customers. Bridgestone came in via the J.B. Hunt collaboration, which passed 50,000 autonomous miles back in 2024 * An unnamed Fortune 500 private fleet piloting Dallas-Houston * **West Fraser**, one of the world's largest wood products companies, starts a Canadian logging pilot within weeks, contract discussions flagged for "the next few months", this will be a nice Atlas Energy type deal on a slightly bigger scale Now for the scale = Werner runs roughly 8,000 tractors. J.B. Hunt runs over 12,000. C.R. England is one of the largest refrigerated carriers in America. **Any one of these converting a low single-digit percentage of its fleet is bigger than everything Kodiak has ever deployed**, and half a dozen of them are in the publicly disclosed funnel with years of integration behind them - I fancy our chances... **The OEM evidence** PACCAR put Kodiak's logo on its own analyst day deck - February 10, 2026, at the Peterbilt factory in Denton, on the "multi-partner strategy" slide next to Aurora and Stack AV (red box is of course mine): [](https://preview.redd.it/aur-is-worth-13b-kdk-is-worth-750m-both-run-driverless-v0-4v9czdelnvph1.png?width=1454&format=png&auto=webp&s=8717b0b08950cc210499ddd9e7e1e6e26916a0c1) [Red boxed for the visually impaired](https://preview.redd.it/rl37hm82qvph1.png?width=1454&format=png&auto=webp&s=221ef2a6fbfed9d53c32ab335e3440bba3b80024) That slide is also why OEM integration eventually happens. Every truck maker is running multiple AV partners - PACCAR with Aurora, Stack AV and Kodiak (we hope). Volvo with both Aurora and Waabi. Daimler owns Torc outright and still approved Kodiak on a Western Star. Traton backs Plus, this is a bit of a weird oddity in that they are seemingly exclusive but they also have a board seat on Plus and hold Plus warrants If one company ends up owning "the driver," the truck underneath becomes a commodity chassis and the OEM loses the most valuable part of its own product. So they platform several to keep the bargaining power, which is why Kodiak doesn't need an exclusive to get onto a production line, going exclusive is the dumbest fucking move for an OEM (unless they own, or intend on owning the underlying technology) From the Q2 call, after an analyst noted nobody gets autonomy access to Daimler because Daimler owns Torc, an obviously competing AV company, so how did they manage to upfit a Daimler truck with Kodiak tech for Atlas: >**Analyst:** "Does 'coordinated with them' mean they approved, assuming you put the technology on there?" **Kodiak CEO:** "Yeah, they have approved." Now add [Bosch to the mix](https://kodiak.ai/news/kodiak-bosch-scale-autonomous-trucking-hardware), the largest tier 1 on the planet, embedded with pretty much all OEMs, now co-developing and scale-manufacturing a production grade redundant platform, delivering validated components with Kodiak since April. "Production-grade" is the phrase that matters, when asked what it takes for driver-out on PACCAR trucks, Feight (again - PACCAR CEO) said *"fully production, validated, completed production, then that's when we have that conversation."* Bosch is our bridge to utopia here There's also a defense business, it's small but it brings in revenue. A US Marine Corps ROGUE-Fires autonomy contract announced in February, General Dynamics Land Systems, the Textron RIPSAW programme, Phase 2 of DIU's ROADS and $30M of prior Army work **Why fleets will buy this shit up** (and they are) Driver pay and benefits are the single biggest line in a carrier's cost per mile, turnover at the big fleets is about 70%. Atlas's CFO called removing that variability "pure accretion" Hours-of-service rules mean a truck sits idle 60-70% of the time, the driver has to sleep. Kodiak board member James Reed, fifteen years a trucking CFO then CEO, puts the autonomous truck at **more than 2x the miles in the same period**. For the mathematically challenged this means we're doubling the revenue throughput of the same capital...then add better fuel economy, zero idling, and no out-of-route miles from drivers detouring to their preferred truck stop and this becomes a no brainer Atlas described a market so tight that anyone hauling sand conventionally needs **three times the trucks** to service the same wells **The "retrofit won't work"** 🐻 **argument against Kodiak is wrong, very very wrong** The 🐻 chants like this, "Kodiak bolts kit onto trucks while Aurora gets factory integration, so Kodiak loses at scale" = yawn Aurora's entire 2026 fleet - the 200 trucks it's ramping toward, are Internationals that Aurora itself upfits with Roush (the same partner as AUR). Everyone retrofits right now, because factory line at scale are a 2028 and beyond story So how big does this get on retrofit alone, well Kodiak's Director of Supply Chain job posting states "from tens of finished units per year to hundreds and ultimately thousands" Run the revenue on it at $60-100K per truck per year: * 1,000 trucks = $60-100M ARR * 3,000 trucks = $180-300M ARR * 5,000 trucks = $300-500M ARR This is a $5-10B business with no OEM deal at all serviced by expanding the existing Roush line they run. I reckon they land an OEM anyway for reasons I've outlined, you just don't need it is my point to have a multi billion dollar business **Kodiak's tech** No map dependence = the system infers drivable surface live, which is why the same driver handles lease roads that change shape overnight and is aimed at I-45. This has been in the works for nearly 10 years now Under a defense programme they trained for winter without collecting a single winter mile: generative AI re-rendered existing sensor logs as synthetic snowy scenes, then the trucks drove into deep Michigan snow first time One outside data point = Nauto, a fleet-safety benchmark built on 6 billion driving miles across 1,000+ fleets, scored the Kodiak Driver 98, tied highest in their network, against 78 for Nauto equipped fleets and 63 for fleets without **Look to the job ads...** Ok all companies have ambitions, some realise them, some do not, but we can infer * The VP of Commercialization ad wants someone who's closed deals of $100M+ contract value. Kodiak did $3.5M of revenue last quarter. At $60-100K per truck a year, $100M is a fleet converting 300-500 trucks. I come back to Werner sized deals above * A supply-chain job mentions, "Kodiak's Partnership team, which owns strategic relationships with key OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers"...which is somewhat interesting language to choose **Price targets (yes, a fucking large element of fortune telling)** [](https://preview.redd.it/aur-is-worth-13b-kdk-is-worth-750m-both-run-driverless-v0-5azdns8sovph1.png?width=1804&format=png&auto=webp&s=6e4063bac3d7bb890758f9beffdc03278d3d543a) [Stolen from the KodiakAI sub](https://preview.redd.it/nepzgzlzpvph1.png?width=1804&format=png&auto=webp&s=132a57e5f7e490e806799b42745ccddf249adc76) This is Bloomberg's analyst screen as of September 4: * Buys 87.5% * Holds 12.5% * Sells 0.0% * Twelve month consensus target $11.07 against a $3.81 last price. Needham initiated on September 9 at $8, after that pic was taken, so an average of $10.70. **When the gap to AUR closes...and close it will** Kodiak doesn't need to catch Aurora, and I don't think they ever will, and that's fine. At Aurora's current $13B, a fifth of it is roughly $8 a share, a third is roughly $12.50 on the diluted count Aurora also won't be static, it will succeed imo and land around $30bn market cap in the coming years **Now the bad news** Now you get to read about how it could implode **1. The lockup expires September 24-25.** Roughly 88M shares come free into a float of about 112M. Low $3s or worse in October is a distinct possibility **2. A raise is coming.** $151M cash against $160M a year of burn, funded into Q2 2027. My guess = they raise into strength off the driver-out launch in Dec **3. The share count.** From the June 10-Q: 52.1M options and 4.1M unvested RSUs, 30.6M preferred common equivalents, 79.6M warrants, 75M legacy earn-out shares at $18/$23/$28 and a 6.25M sponsor earn-out at $18. Nothing disastrous here however