A letter from our founders to our shareholders

To our employees, partners, and shareholders,

Our goal at Aurora is to make the movement of goods and people more democratic, more productive, more dependable, and — crucially — much safer than it is today. We believe we can make transportation both less expensive and more accessible, and serve communities and industries in mutually beneficial and transformative ways. The work we do, the products we deliver, and the partnerships we build at Aurora all serve our mission: to deliver the benefits of self-driving technology safely, quickly, and broadly.

To achieve this mission, we’re building a team aligned on the value of a business that operates with integrity, moves with urgency, and is motivated by the bold path we’re charting to solve one of the most challenging problems of our generation. We know that in a space as challenging and competitive as self-driving we will win or lose based on our ability to attract world-class talent and partners, create the environment in which we can all do our best work, and ultimately deliver our product, the Aurora Driver. 

We founded Aurora five years ago because we saw an opportunity to reboot self-driving vehicle development and start fresh on a problem engineers have been tackling in the same general way for a decade. We each bring decades of experience in self-driving to Aurora. We’ve seen the technology evolve and the opportunity come into even sharper focus. And we believed that by bringing a deeply experienced team together around a clean sheet, we could build the next generation of self-driving: one that incorporated the lessons of the past while building on the technology and business model of the future. 

Our product is designed to give our partners greater access to safe, efficient drivers, enabling them to scale their respective businesses and deliver even more value to their customers. And like others who built technologies we now take for granted (such as smartphones, computers, and even the automobile) that fundamentally transformed society while also creating immense value for their shareholders, we are fortunate to work on a problem, and to build a company where we see economic and social benefits to be deeply aligned.

The path in front of us is not easy, and success is not foregone. At each step along the way we will lean into our experience, our mission, and our core values to guide us to deliver technology that will transform mobility, logistics and our lives in a profound way. 

Thank you for joining us in this journey.  

Chris Urmson, CEO & Co-Founder Sterling Anderson, CPO & Co-Founder Drew Bagnell, Chief Scientist & Co-Founder