Kodiak AI, Inc.

Thank you for standing by. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Cordiac first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. Today, we ask you to limit to one question and one follow-up. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, Simply press star 1 again. Thank you. I would now like to turn the call over to Daniel Goff, Vice President of External Affairs. You may begin.

On the call today are Don Burnett, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Kodiak, and Surajit Dutta, Chief Financial Officer of Kodiak. A press release and an earnings presentation were issued earlier today and are posted on the Investor Relations section of our website. This call is being broadcast live via a webcast, and a replay will be available on our website after the call. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that during today's call, Kodiak will be making forward-looking statements within the meeting of the federal securities laws about financial performance and future events, including our guidance for fiscal second quarter and full fiscal year 2026, as well as our long-term goals. Actual events or results could differ materially. Please refer to our SEC filings, including our most recent Form 10-K and the Form 8-K filed with today's press release for important risks and other factors that may cause our actual results to differ from those in our forward-looking statements. Additional information will also be set forth in our quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2026. We disclaim any obligation, except as required by law, to update or revise any financial or operational guidance and long-term goals or other forward-looking statements. whether because of new information, future events, or otherwise. Any forward-looking statements made on this call speak only as of the date of this call. Further, in addition to discussing results that are calculated in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles, we also refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. For more detailed information on our non-GAAP financial disclosures, including reconciliations to most comparable GAAP measures, please refer to our earnings release, which can be found on our investor relations website. I will now turn the call over to Don. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us. Before getting into our Q1 results, I'm excited to highlight that today we announced a $100 million capital raise. With our strengthened balance sheet, we believe we have extended our liquidity into Q2 of 2027, which will enable us to support the next phase of growth as we scale our driverless deployments. Now, I'd like to turn to our Q1 results. In the first quarter, we increased both the scale and productivity of our growing driverless deployment, expanded our partner ecosystem across the long-haul, industrial, and defense verticals, and made meaningful progress toward our driverless long-haul launch targeted for late 2026. We also made significant progress maturing our physical AI power technology and product while maintaining financial discipline and capital efficiency. We deployed eight additional trucks in Q1 for a total of 28 driverless trucks, further expanding our industry-leading driverless truck deployment. As of quarter end, those trucks have driven more than 23,500 paid driverless hours, a 120% increase from the end of Q4 of last year. These hours are equivalent to over a decade of working as a truck driver. Further, the hours driven in Q1 exceeded all the driverless hours driven in 2025. Over the same period, cumulative loads delivered increased to more than 15,600, representing approximately 24% growth. That includes more than 200,000 tons of freight, approximately the weight of the Sears Tower, delivered in Q1 alone. We believe these results demonstrate that we are successfully scaling our product and delivering increasing value to our customers. Because Kodiak's integrated platforms are powered by a single autonomous stack, the capabilities we develop, the miles driven, and the new customers and partners we work with create a compounding flywheel effect, benefiting long-haul, industrial, and defense applications. In the first quarter, we made strong progress on strategic partnerships and customer engagements as industry leaders continue to choose the Kodiak driver to enable their autonomous future. I'd like to highlight one exciting announcement we made earlier today, a strategic partnership with General Dynamics Land Systems, or GDLS, to collaborate on autonomous military ground vehicles. GDLS, part of the Fortune 100 General Dynamics Group, manufactures critical platforms such as the M1A2 Abrams tank and the Stryker combat vehicle. Working with GDLS will allow us to extend our reach into the core of the defense ecosystem, It also demonstrates our flexible approach to defense engagements. We are working with industry leaders to support paths to production and revenue, while simultaneously contracting directly with the Pentagon, as we have done with the Marines' Rogue Fires program. Our work with General Dynamics Land Systems is already generating results. In March, we unveiled the first vehicle we developed in collaboration with GDLS, the Leonidas Autonomous Ground Vehicle. The Leonidas AGV combines the Kodiak driver with Epirus's cutting-edge, high-power microwave system for counter-drone operations, supported by GDLS's system integration expertise. We continue to make significant progress on our core technologies. Driving this progress is our increasingly aggressive adoption of AI tools that are proving to be true force multipliers across our company. AV developers are only as good as the tool they use, and AI is enabling us to develop new, powerful tooling that is already transforming how we work. In Q1, we launched company-wide Model Context Protocol, or MCP, servers that allow agentic AI tools to connect to all of our company data sources, allowing the entire company, not just engineering, to develop new, bespoke AI-powered tools tailored specifically to individual needs. In layman's terms, these NCP servers and related data pipelines empower our team to use plain English to build AI tools and proliferate AI agents that massively increase our productivity, efficiency, and problem-solving capabilities. This, in turn, is driving a transformation in how we run our business. For example, we've used our MCP service to develop Prism, a flexible new tool that allows anyone in the company to search across thousands of hours of unstructured driving data using only text prompts, surfacing patterns and root cause analysis that previously required dedicated engineering effort. Prism can explain the Kodiak driver's behavior in intuitive ways to both technical and non-technical teams using natural language. We've used this new capability to tune the Kodiak driver in ways that would not have been possible before. For example, we use PRISM to not only identify commonalities among challenging highway scenarios, but even identify potential improvements that we have since adopted. But these tools are not only about software. They also help to drive improvements in hardware, manufacturing, and beyond. On the hardware side, we announced that Kodiak will use the NVIDIA Drive Hyperion architecture in the next generation of Kodiak driver-powered trucks. We believe this will increase our ability to deploy even more capable and efficient driverless trucks over time. Additionally, at CES in January, we laid out our vision for industrializing the Kodiak driver through our strategic collaboration with Bosch, one of the world's leading automotive suppliers. Through this collaboration, we will leverage Bosch's manufacturing expertise to deploy driverless vehicles at scale. This week, at ACT Expo, we demonstrated the progress we have already made together exhibiting an early prototype Kodiak sensor pod outfitted with Bosch camera and radar sensors. Taken together, these partnerships enhance the ecosystem needed to efficiently scale simultaneously across all three verticals, from vehicle platforms to industrialized hardware to AI compute. With that, I'd like to discuss our progress toward our targeted driverless long-haul launch in late 2026. As of the end of April, our long-haul autonomy readiness measure increased to 86%, reflecting steady progress in launch readiness. As we leverage our increasing investments in our team and AI tooling, we believe that our ARM progress will accelerate in Q2 and beyond. Over the course of the quarter, we completed numerous safety case claims, including claims covering our driverless long-haul sensor field of view requirements and our redundant braking subsystems. As a reminder, completing a safety case is about collecting sufficient evidence to demonstrate safety, and Kodiak is one of only a small handful of AV companies that have successfully built a safety case and launched driverless operations. We continue to hone our safety case structure as we refine our safety processes and implement our learnings from our long-haul industrial and defense operations. To reach an arm of 100% and unlock long-haul driverless operations, we will continue to gather evidence to close our remaining claims. That work leverages the safety methodology, testing, and documentation processes we established over our nearly 18 months of driverless operational experience in the Permian. In addition to our work on the safe launch of our long-haul driverless product, we continue to expand our long-haul commercial operations, delivering freight with leading shippers and carriers from our Dallas hub. This afternoon, we announced that we launched service with a new carrier, Rail Transport. Through our collaboration, we are hauling freight with rail transport between Dallas and Houston four times a week. Rail transport is one of North America's safest trucking companies as recognized by the American Trucking Associations, or ATA. They are a recent recipient of the ATA's President's Award, the trucking industry's highest safety honor. They specifically chose Kodiak because of our shared commitment to safety. During Q1, we also began freight services between Dallas and El Paso in cooperation with one of our long-term customers. This freight lane is our second route beyond a single hours of service after Dallas to Atlanta. It is just the kind of long-haul lane where the Kodiak driver can offer the most value given the challenges fleets face staffing these routes. These true long-haul freight operations are critical to helping us build a product that meets our customers' needs. We are working closely with all of our long-haul customers to prepare them for driverless operations in the coming quarters. While preparing for long-haul driverless represents our core focus for 2026, our industrial business demonstrates how our driverless technology is continuing to deliver value to our customers and expanding to other geographies and use cases. Today, I'm excited to announce our planned pilot operations with West Fraser, one of the world's largest wood product companies, to demonstrate the Kodiak driver in logging operations in Canada. This will mark our first pilot in the forestry industry our first international expansion, and our initial operations with flatbed trailers. Logging routes, like oil and gas routes we see in the Permian, are among the most demanding environments in trucking. We believe this pilot will further demonstrate the versatility of our system across geographies and trailer types and expands the range of industrial use cases where the Kodiak driver can deliver value. In addition to our new pilot in Canada, we continue to make meaningful progress in our Atlas deployment Since we are not reliant on HD maps, we can quickly add new routes to our operational design domain. To date, we have delivered on over 15 unique routes with Atlas, each with its own complexities. We also expect to continue to execute against our initial 100 truck commitment with Atlas over the next several quarters and expect to execute two with driverless trucks in the mid-30s. Atlas is evaluating deploying the Kodiak driver on a new OEM platform for the remaining trucks. This transition, beginning in Q3, will include a shift to a more economical day cab from a sleeper berth, which we believe will be the predominant configuration for driverless operations across both industrial and long haul. We believe our modular, platform-agnostic architecture positions us well to support this transition efficiently, and we are working closely with Atlas to meet their evolving fleet requirements. We view this as an exciting opportunity to demonstrate the ease of integration of our technology on an additional truck platform. Delivery timing will remain closely aligned with our customer needs and will depend on factors such as procurement of the new truck platform, fleet planning, deployment schedules, and critical hardware and truck availability and lead times. As a result of this platform transition and associated procurement timelines, we now expect to deliver a similar number of trucks in the second half of 2026 as we expect to deliver in the first half. As the new platform scales, we expect deployment to accelerate. We anticipate completing Atlas's initial 100 truck commitment in the first half of 2027. Now turning to defense. With General Dynamics land systems and beyond, we continue to add wins in the defense vertical, where reliability and performance in complex environments are mission critical. At the broadest level, we are seeing the defense autonomy ecosystem evolve from experimentation to deployment, as ongoing geopolitical instability forces both the Pentagon and our allies to accelerate their timelines for frontier technologies like autonomy. Underlining this increased interest, the President's 2027 defense budget includes over $50 billion in funding across land, air, and sea for Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, up from just $225 million in 2026. We therefore expect to see increased revenue-generating opportunities in 2027 and beyond. Our recent successes in defense demonstrate the maturity and adaptability of our system in mission-critical environments, and we believe will position us well as the Pentagon increasingly turns to commercial partners to accelerate autonomous ground vehicle deployments. Moving on from defense, Q1 saw continued regulatory progress for the autonomous vehicle industry. We are encouraged by continued momentum toward a more consistent federal approach, which we believe will further support broader adoption over time. At the state level, California recently published final status regulations that will allow us to deploy the Kodiak driver in our home state, thereby enabling us to offer coast to coast driverless service. These regulations will provide us with additional regulatory certainty. We plan on submitting our application for a California testing permit in the coming weeks. Similarly, Texas also launched its new AV permitting program. After submitting our first responder interaction plan to state officials, we received our Texas AV authorizations. We continue to engage with regulators at both the state and federal level. One engagement of note was our participation in a grant-funded public demonstration in cooperation with DriveOhio, the Ohio Department of Transportation's hub for smart mobility technology. Our work with DriveOhio represents Kodiak's first operational deployment outside of the Sunbelt and enabled us to demonstrate our long-haul autonomous solution to policymakers and industry leaders in Ohio and Indiana. As we prepared for this engagement, we passed an exciting milestone. We added our 25,000 mile to our commercial network, which is more than the circumference of the earth. The massive size of our network underlines the flexibility of our routing technology, which enables us to quickly add new routes across a range of geographies and deployment types. In closing, we believe our $100 million equity financing, combined with our continued product maturation and driverless deployments, position us to scale driver-as-a-service across long-haul, industrial, and defense in a disciplined and capital-efficient way. We are well on our way to scaling Kodiak into a sustainable business that provides real value to customers, and I am excited by the opportunity ahead. I'd like to take a moment to thank all of the Kodiakers who worked so hard in the first quarter to drive us forward. Autonomous driving is the first wide-reaching application of physical AI. This is just the beginning. Now, over to Zorajit.