Autonomous Yard Tractor Developer Outrider Raises $62M
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Autonomous electric yard tractor software developer Outrider raised $62 million in an oversubscribed Series D financing round, it said Oct. 24.
Brighton, Colo.-based Outrider said the funding will drive the commercial scaling of Outrider’s autonomous yard operations as a service business with Fortune 500 customers in 2025.
Outrider expects to scale to hundreds of systems with key customers and address additional use cases in the coming 12 months, it added.
While 2025’s focus will be on distribution center applications, Outrider said its autonomy kit could see use in intermodal rail and port terminals.
Testing began in 2019, with Outrider claiming its customer list represents more than 20% of all yard trucks in operation in North America.
There's a reason we're the leader! And, why we raised $62M in Series D financing. pic.twitter.com/MSOiQfcehN — Outrider (@OutriderTech) October 24, 2024
Outrider’s autonomy kit includes multimodal sensor suites for perception, robotic arms for brake line connections and communications equipment.
While using the kit, yard tractors can still hitch and unhitch from trailers, connect and disconnect brake lines and back into loading docks.
Connecting and disconnecting brake lines is carried out using robot arms in less than 30 seconds with the patented TrailerConnect deep learning artificial intelligence technology.
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Outrider has 11 issued patents and over 50 pending patents worldwide.
“This patent portfolio demonstrates the Outrider team’s continued commitment to automating the vast array of manual, repetitive tasks involved in inhospitable yard environments,” Chief Technology Officer Vittorio Ziparo said in April when the 11th patent was granted.
“These inventions, combined with relentless attention to the safety, reliability and scalability of our technology, are changing the transportation and logistics of the global supply chain,” Ziparo added.
The Outrider system is available on the Orange EV e-Triever with an Outrider autonomous specification, but a spokeswoman said the company is electric vehicle platform agnostic and was working with all the leading yard truck original equipment manufacturers.
The latest funding round was led by Koch Disruptive Technologies and New Enterprise Associates, with additional investments from 8VC, Ark Invest, B37 Ventures, FM Capital, Interwoven Ventures, Nvidia’s venture capital arm NVentures and Prologis Ventures.
So far, Outrider has raised more than $250 million.
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