Aurora Innovation, Inc.

Greetings and welcome to the Aurora Innovation fourth quarter 2022 business review call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during this conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to our host, Stacey Fite, Vice President, Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.

Thank you, Diego. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our fourth quarter and full year 2022 business review call. We announced our results earlier this afternoon. Our shareholder letter and a presentation to accompany this call are available on our investor relations website at ir.aurora.tech. The shareholder letter was also furnished with our Form 8-K, filed today with the SEC. On the call with me today are Chris Urmson, co-founder and CEO, and Richard Thame, CFO. Chris will provide an update on the progress we have made across the key pillars of our business, and Richard will recap our fourth quarter and full year financial results. We will then open the call to Q&A. A recording of this conference call will be available on our investor relations website at ir.aurora.tech shortly after this call has ended. I'd like to take this opportunity to remind you that during this call, we will be making forward-looking statements. This includes statements related to the achievement of certain milestones around the development and commercialization of the Aurora driver and Aurora Horizon on our anticipated timeframe, the expected performance of our business and potential opportunities with partners and pilot customers, expected cash runway, and overall future prospects. These statements are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected or implied during this call. In particular, those described nervous factors included in our quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30th, 2022, filed with the SEC on November 3rd, 2022, as well as the current uncertainty and unpredictability in our business, the markets, and economy. You should not rely on our forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. All forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on assumptions and beliefs as of the date hereof, and Aurora disclaims any obligation to update any forward-looking statements except as required by law. Our discussion today may include non-GAAP financial measures. These non-GAAP measures should be considered in addition to and not as a substitute for or in isolation from our GAAP results. Information regarding our non-GAAP financial results, including a reconciliation of our historical GAAP to non-GAAP results, may be found in our shareholder letter, which was furnished with our Form 8-K, filed today with the SEC, and may also be found on our Investor Relations website. With that, I will now turn the call over to Chris.

Thank you, Stacey. Fourth quarter marked our first full year as a public company, and in that time, we made remarkable progress building the Aurora Driver, our self-driving system, and toward commercialization of Aurora Horizon, our autonomous trucking subscription service. We furthered these goals in the fourth quarter with our Aurora Driver Beta 5.0 release, which we believe puts us on track to achieve our critical feature-complete milestone by the end of the first quarter of 2023. As I regularly tell our team, we're reaching the end of the beginning, We are looking ahead to significant milestones with incredible enthusiasm as we prepare to enter the next phase, refining and validating our technology as we work toward closing the Aurora Driver safety case by the end of 2023. At the same time, we've also continued to strengthen our operations and we've made steady progress with our OEM partners on autonomy-enabled truck platforms to support our planned commercial launch by the end of 2024. During the fourth quarter, we released Aurora Driver Beta 5.0 continuing our commitment to deliver quarterly product updates that advance the Aurora driver. This update introduced new capabilities to detect and appropriately respond to emergency vehicles, like ambulances, fire engines, and law enforcement vehicles. As I'm sure many of you have experienced, emergency vehicles do not always behave predictably or follow customary rules of the road, so the proper response by a self-driving vehicle is critical to being a safe and courteous driver. When the Aurora driver perceives an emergency vehicle on the shoulder ahead, it knows to slow down or change lanes according to Texas laws. When the Aurora driver detects an active emergency vehicle ahead of or behind the truck, it alerts a specialist in our command center via Aurora Beacon for additional guidance to include coming to a stop off the roadway if necessary. In the video on page six of the slide deck, an Aurora driver-powered truck is traveling from Houston to Dallas when it encounters an emergency scene. You can see the Aurora driver execute a lane change to maneuver around a stopped fire engine that is partially encroaching on the truck's original lane, followed by police vehicles, an ambulance, and emergency personnel on the shoulder. Beta 5.0 also established the ability for the Aurora driver to re-enter traffic from the shoulder, building on the fault management system, or FMS as we call it, that we introduced last year. Completing this end-to-end flow of pausing and resuming operations while en route is a mission-critical capability. As a quick refresher, the FMS is designed to actively monitor the health of the vehicle and the Aurora driver and mitigate any adverse events. So now, if the system deems it necessary to pull off to the shoulder for something such as an extreme weather event, the Aurora driver also now has the ability to re-enter the flow of traffic once the issue has been resolved. You can see an example of this end-to-end capability in the video on page seven of the slide deck. The Aurora driver's FMS has been triggered, which initiates communication with a specialist in our command center via Aurora beacon. The Aurora driver then executes on the command from the specialist to pull over to the shoulder. After addressing the situation, you can then see the Aurora driver wait for a safe opportunity to merge back into traffic, begin to accelerate, and then successfully return from the shoulder. Lastly, as we've talked about in previous updates, construction is one of the biggest challenges an autonomous vehicle faces while operating on the highway. New road signs, changing traffic patterns, and varying road blockages create situations that require a specific capability set. One of the most common situations faced is the need for a truck to partially or completely deviate from its current lane due to construction barriers, which may include driving on the shoulder of the road. With the Beta 5.0 release, we built on previously released capabilities that address construction scenarios, introducing the ability to navigate lanes with temporary barriers. We also extended the distance that the Aurora driver is able to nudge around obstacles outside of the current lane, including driving partially on the shoulder for an extended period of time. The addition of these capabilities equips the Aurora driver with the skills necessary to handle even more construction scenarios it may encounter while hauling commercial loads for our customers. In the video on page 8 of the slide deck, you can see these capabilities come to life. The Aurora driver is traveling from Fort Worth to El Paso when it encounters a complex construction scene. The Aurora driver recognizes that a lane has been created, first with cones, and then with cones and jersey barriers. The Aurora driver confidently proceeds through this construction zone. utilizing the extra buffer we enabled by driving partially on the shoulder to give itself the extra space it needs since the cones are encroaching in its lane. The Beta 5.0 release continues our work of building on our previous updates and advancing Aurora toward the feature-complete milestone, which we expect to achieve at the end of the first quarter of 2023. As we begin to shift our focus to the next stage of preparing for commercialization, I'm excited to share that the first lane that we plan to launch the Aurora driver on is Dallas to Houston. Once the Aurora driver is feature complete, this will indicate that we have implemented all of the capabilities necessary for the Dallas to Houston launch lane and removed all policy interventions for this route. Following this step, we then plan to enter the final phase of refining the Aurora driver's performance through subsequent beta releases and completing the necessary validation to close the safety case for the Aurora driver to operate without a person on board by the end of 2023. The completion of this is the milestone we call Aurora Driver Ready. One of the ways we measure continuous improvement is by how often a vehicle operator needs to intervene to support a particular capability. A great example of this is our ability to handle road debris, which can be dangerous and is also common on highways. As you can see in the chart on page 9 of the slide deck, through incremental refinement to our road debris detection capability that we introduced in September, We achieved an approximately 70% decline in vehicle operator interventions due to road debris. While we continue to advance our software, we are simultaneously maturing the road driver's hardware to support our commercial launch, as well as taking steps toward a longer-term scalable hardware kit. During the fourth quarter, we demonstrated the performance of a prototype of our proprietary First Light LiDAR using our in-house designed silicon photonics chip. The prototype has demonstrated the compatibility of our silicon photonics technology with our LiDAR architecture by meeting or exceeding the performance of our existing LiDAR. The ability to consolidate fragile fiber optic cables within complex assemblies into silicon chips, each the size of a fingernail, is a key step toward a fully integrated and fiberless first light LiDAR. Our silicon photonics are designed to create a clear path to our longer-term cost and reliability targets for first light at scale. Turning to our operations, in the fourth quarter, we exceeded our target to autonomously haul 30 loads per week for our pilot customers. And I'm happy to share that we have already achieved our first quarter goal of 40 loads per week, well ahead of schedule. Customers continue to increase their usage of Aurora Horizon, which allows us to further leverage commercial runs to help offset the cost of development and validation of the Aurora driver while operating in a commercially representative setting. To date, through February 12th, we have autonomously delivered, under the supervision of vehicle operators, 1,150 loads, driving 324,000 miles, with 98% on-time performance for our pilot customers, including FedEx, Werner, Schneider, and Uber Freight. Additionally, our commercial-ready terminals offer partners a defined flow and a complete end-to-end experience, allowing them to see how easily Aurora driver-powered trucks can be integrated into their networks. In the fourth quarter, we also announced a strategic collaboration with Rider to pilot an on-site fleet maintenance program. This will put Rider technicians on the ground at our terminal in Dallas to provide inspections, maintain trailers, and help minimize downtime. Through this collaboration, our goal is to reduce maintenance costs and unlock higher utilization to bring added value to our pilot customers and further position Aurora Horizon for autonomous operations at scale. In addition to optimizing our operations, we continue to work closely with regulators, elected officials, law enforcement, and local communities to drive positive momentum for self-driving commercialization. We had an exciting development last quarter in Pennsylvania, which started 2022 as one of the few states where self-driving vehicles were not permitted to operate without a human driver. Through continuous engagement, we helped shape legislation that was signed into law in November. unlocking the state for driverless testing and deployment of passenger vehicles and trucks. Our commitment to the Commonwealth is substantial and is underscored by the Robotics and Autonomous Engineering Associates degree program we recently launched in partnership with the Pittsburgh Technology College. This is a program designed to support local communities and open the door to unique jobs we expect to be creating in the autonomous vehicle industry. We have seen great interest in the program and are working to replicate it with several institutions across the country. Additionally, we are encouraged by the continued progress we are seeing in California toward permitting deployment of autonomous trucks in the state. Following the open letter submitted by the AV industry to Governor Newsom last summer, the state held a workshop last month to discuss modifying regulations around heavy-duty autonomous vehicles. Further, as part of Aurora's commitment to safety and transparency, in December we released an updated safety report, our 2022 Voluntary Safety Self-Assessment or VSSA. I encourage you to review the paper, which can be found on our website. It outlines our safety approach, centering around five pillars, proficiency, fail-safe, continuous improvement, resilience, and trustworthiness. Safety is at the core of our work with our truck OEM partners, PACCAR and Volvo Trucks. In the fourth quarter, we worked in collaboration with PACCAR to build an important prototype of their truck platform designed specifically for autonomous commercial scalability. and we were proud to have our joint development of a Peterbilt 579 equipped with the Aurora Driver showcased by PACCAR at their booth at the 2023 Consumer Electronics Show in January. Additionally, we were excited to have a prototype Volvo VNL with Aurora Driver hardware showcased at the American Trucking Association Management Conference and Exhibition in October. We continued development with Volvo Autonomous Solutions on an autonomous VNL featuring enhanced control interfaces braking, steering, and power systems to achieve the reliability needed for safe driverless operations. We're always pleased to see our customer and OEM partners find opportunities to work together and drive progress toward the commercialization of autonomous vehicles. In the fourth quarter, Volvo Autonomous Solutions and Uber Freight announced a strategic partnership that involves the planned deployment of Volvo's autonomous transport solution on Uber Freight's network, which is made possible by the joint work we're doing with VAS to develop and scale autonomous transportation solutions with the Aurora driver. In closing, I'd like to reiterate the progress Aurora has made over the last year. We've built, expanded, and strengthened key partnerships while maturing the key elements of Aurora Horizon, the Aurora driver, operations, and truck platforms. We have continued to successfully execute against the objectives we identified on our roadmap to commercialization on time or early every quarter. And we've continued to attract top talent and make strategic hires to help us achieve our upcoming milestones. I'm pleased to share that we've recently appointed Osa Fisher as our new president to help further support our business. Osa, who will be based in Dallas and brings more than 20 years of leadership experience to Aurora, will help us unlock more efficiencies across our company and further strengthen our existing relationships with industry-leading partners as we scale and prepare for commercial launch. We also welcomed Chris Barrett to lead people operations. Chris brings extensive leadership experience in fostering strong culture and high-performing teams spanning the tech and medical industries, and I'm thrilled he has joined the team. Earlier in February, we were also honored to be named by LexisNexis as one of the companies leading the future of science and technology in its Innovation Momentum 2023, the Global Top 100 Intellectual Property Report. This distinction is particularly notable as Aurora was the only AV technology company recognized and one of just three companies in the automotive industry. Aurora's inclusion in this report, which is an external and independent measure of global technological strength, innovation momentum, and patent quality, validates our belief that we have one of the strongest self-driving intellectual property portfolios, which we expect to support our path to commercial launch. 2023 will be a pivotal year for our business as we focus on reaching future complete by the end of the first quarter, closing the Aurora driver safety case for our launch lane in Texas, and preparing for commercial launch by the end of 2024. We're incredibly excited to share our progress during the coming year and showcase all of the work that has been years in the making to reach what we expect to be incredible milestones for Aurora. Despite macroeconomic conditions, I'm the most optimistic about the state of our business and our progress that I've ever been. With that, I will now pass it over to Richard, who will review our financial results. Thank you, Chris.