Outrider raises $73M in new funding

Self-driving technology developer Outrider has raised $73 million in a new funding round.

Outrider, which makes an autonomous system designed for truck yard operations, plans to use the funds from the series C round to add to its suite of autonomous and safety technology products. It will hire more workers domestically and abroad.

The funding round allows Outrider, which is headquartered in Golden, Colo., to serve customers across the large package shipping, retail, e-commerce, consumer packaged goods, grocery, manufacturing and intermodal segments of the freight industry.

The new funding will accelerate the company’s work with EV yard truck manufacturers, Outrider said.

Outrider’s series C funding round was led by FM Capital, in Boulder, Colo., which has a track record of investing in automotive and transportation startups.

“Outrider has addressed all the pieces — technology, safety, operations and support — needed to deploy a reliable, industrial-grade system at scale,” FM Capital Managing Partner Mark Norman said. “The company is a case study in bringing advanced robotics and autonomy technology to market.”

Other notable investors include the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and NVenture, Nvidia’s venture capital arm.

“Our confidence in Outrider is based on its technical and commercial leadership in yard automation for fully autonomous vehicles to integrate fluidly into real-world customer operations,” NVenture’s head Mohamed Siddeek said. “The fundamental processing pipeline for autonomous vehicles can be applied to all kinds of autonomous and robotics systems — a key area of focus for Nvidia.”

The funding round also attracted B37 Ventures, Lineage Logistics’ venture capital division Lineage Ventures, Sumitomo Corp.’s venture arm Presidio Ventures and ROBO Global Ventures.

Henrik Christensen, a founding member of ROBO Global’s advisory board and Qualcomm chair of robotics at the University of California-San Diego, has joined Outrider as a board adviser.

Existing investors participating in this round include Koch Disruptive Technologies and New Enterprise Associates.

To date, Outrider has raised $191 million in financing. The company, founded in 2017 by Andrew Smith, a 2022 Automotive News all-star, includes industrial warehouse giant Prologis, Evolv Ventures and Kraft Heinz’s $100 million venture fund among its early investors.

This latest infusion of cash comes on the heels of the debut of Outrider’s TrailerConnect system, which robotically connects electric and pressurized brake lines to trailers and container chassis.

TrailerConnect uses robotic arms to locate and identify different connection patterns among trailers. It relies on software-based algorithms, hardware and sensors integrated into the robot arms, and is part of Outrider’s goal to provide self-driving electric trucks to automate freight yards.

Outrider said its customer fleets collectively represent more than 20 percent of all yard trucks operating in North America. Since 2019, the company has worked with its customers in joint product testing and pilot operations.

In 2021, Outrider teamed up with consumer packaged goods giant Georgia-Pacific to equip its Elmwood, Ill., distribution center with vehicles that completed 1,000 autonomous zero-emission trailer moves.