Connect with us

Tech

Kodiak AI raises $100M at a steep discount, sending its stock tumbling 37%

Published

on

Kodiak AI’s stock tumbled 37% in after-hours trading Thursday after the self-driving truck startup disclosed it had raised $100 million by selling shares at a steep discount — a sign that investors were willing to back the company but not at its current market price.

The company sold shares at $6.50 each, well below its closing price of $9.10, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The raise also included warrants — instruments that give investors the right to buy additional shares later at a set price, in this case as low as $6.

The financing came from existing backer Ares Management and several unnamed institutional investors.

The influx of capital comes Kodiak pushes forward on the expensive task of scaling its self-driving trucks business, which covers off-road industrial settings and public highways, with the ultimate goal of eventually spending less than it earns. Kodiak reported revenue of $1.8 million in the first quarter, up from the $1.4 million it logged in same period a year prior. The company’s loss from operations was $37.8 million, twice what it reported in the same period last year.

Those numbers help explain why the discount terms rattled investors. The company is burning cash fast, and the raise — while sizable — does little to change that math in the near term.

Kodiak has made some recent progress on the business front, including a new commercial contract with Roehl Transport, a pilot program to test Kodiak-equipped autonomous trucks at West Fraser Timber Co.’s log-hauling operations in Alberta, Canada, and a collaboration with the military vehicle maker General Dynamics Land Systems to create autonomous ground vehicles for defense applications.

Under the deal with Roehl, which was also announced Thursday, Kodiak-equipped trucks will autonomously haul freight between Dallas and Houston on four round trips per week. The trucks operate autonomously on the entirety of the trip, but Kodiak keeps a human safety operator behind the wheel as a precaution.

Techcrunch event

San Francisco, CA
|
October 13-15, 2026

Kodiak founder and CEO Don Burnette said the company is on track to move to driverless trucking on public highways later this year as it ramps up operations.

“We have tons of over-the-road long haul initiatives, and bringing on new partners continues to show momentum,” he said in an interview. “We’re excited about the progress that we’re making as we march toward our driverless launch later this year.”

For now, Kodiak owns the trucks, provides the safety driver, and carries the freight for Roehl along with its other existing on-highway customers, which include Werner, J.B. Hunt, Bridgestone, Martin Brower, and C.R. England. But that arrangement will change once it goes to driverless trucking operations.

“Our intention is to not own the trucks at that point [but to] operate our driver-as-a-service model, where [customers] own and operate the trucks,” Burnette said. He added that this is the system it uses with its off-highway customer Atlas for its driverless deployment in the Permian Basin of Texas.

While Kodiak plans to pull the safety driver by the end of 2026, Burnette said it won’t start driverless operations on public highways until it has finished validating the technology.

“It’s already operating under all of the conditions that we expect to launch driverless, but there’s a lot of validation work that we need to do, and that’s where we bring in our autonomy readiness measure,” Burnette said, describing the initiative — released Thursday — as a zero-to-100 score tracking how much of Kodiak’s internal safety validation is complete. As of April, Kodiak was at 86%, Burnette said.

The company, which was previously called Kodiak Robotics, went public in September via a merger with special-purpose acquisition company Ares Acquisition Corporation II, an affiliate of Ares Management. The deal valued the startup at about $2.5 billion. 

At the time, Kodiak raised $275 million in financing. More than $212.5 million came from certain institutional investors, including $145 million in PIPE funding (Private Investment in Public Equity, a method by which investors purchase shares directly from a public company) and about $62.9 million in trust cash from Ares. That trust cash shrank from its initial $562 million as some SPAC investors redeemed their shares — a standard provision that lets SPAC investors recover their money before a merger closes.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.

>

Continue Reading

Tech

Nvidia Adds Hardware Monitoring Design to AI Agent Safety Platform

Published

on

Nvidia adds a Sentry hardware monitoring design to its AI agent safety platform. See what OpenShell offers now and what IT teams still need to verify.

The post Nvidia Adds Hardware Monitoring Design to AI Agent Safety Platform appeared first on TechRepublic.

>

Continue Reading

Tech

Shopify opens checkout to browser-based AI agents

Published

on

While some retailers, like Amazon (and Adidas, apparently!), are blocking AI agents from making purchases on users’ behalf on their respective platforms, e-commerce platform Shopify has moved in the other direction.

On Monday, the company announced that browser-based AI agents can now complete purchases on Shopify merchants’ sites, extending their capabilities beyond just searching for products and adding items to carts.

Shopify previously supported WebMCP for its storefronts and carts, allowing browser-based AI agents to comb through a Shopify retailer’s inventory, search for products, and add them to a cart. The addition of WebMCP support for checkout, including Shop Pay, means these agents can now read the checkout screen, update it, and submit the transaction with the buyer’s authorization, without relying on screenshots or scraping webpages, the company said.

Image Credits:Shopify

This update introduces three new tools — get_checkout, update_checkout, and complete_checkout — that allow agents to inspect a checkout, change things like the customer’s address or delivery option, and then place an order after the buyer authorizes it.

The feature is rolling out to all eligible Shopify merchants, said Gil Greenberg, a staff product manager who works on agentic commerce at Shopify, in a post on X.

Shopify already offers a hosted Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, which allows agents to work server-to-server. The proposed standard WebMCP, meanwhile, is designed for agents that work inside the buyer’s browser. Both leverage Shopify’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), which provides a common way to search for and discover products, build carts, and check out.

Top AI agents like Muse and Instinct already have direct partnerships with Shopify for agentic commerce. The Instinct partnership was announced today.

“If your agent is operating in the buyer’s browser, use WebMCP tools provided on storefront and checkout to efficiently complete order placement, instead of navigating HTML built for humans,” Greenberg wrote on X. “These WebMCP tools provide structured and efficient APIs, purposely designed — via UCP — to ensure accurate commerce facts, required disclosures, and handoff requirements.”

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.

>

Continue Reading

Tech

Tesla delays Roadster 2 event again due to bad weather

Published

on

Tesla is pushing back the reveal of its redesigned, second-generation Roadster once again, this time due to a forecast of severe weather.

Originally slated for October 1 in Waco, Texas, the event is being pushed to October 15, Tesla said.

“We’ve been tracking the weather closely with local meteorologists, but given the severe conditions predicted & because this event can only be held outdoors, we’ve made the difficult decision to reschedule,” the company wrote in a post on X.

The event presumably needs to be held outdoors because Tesla has been working on integrating cold gas thrusters from SpaceX that are supposed to make the Roadster fly in some capacity.

This reveal has been delayed many times before, and Musk has pushed it for months altogether before this scheduled date. At one point, Musk even planned to hold the event on April Fools’ day of this year. He said during Tesla’s annual meeting in 2025 — the same one where he was awarded a $1 trillion pay package — that an April Fools’ day event would offer him “some deniability” if it got delayed again.

“Like, I could say I was just kidding,” he said at the time.

Tesla first showed off its concept of a second-generation Roadster in 2017 at an event where it debuted the Semi, the company’s electric big rig. The new-look roadster was supposed to be the first supercar the company designed from the ground up, as the original Roadster, which got the company its start in the early 2010s, was largely based on the Lotus Elise.

At the time, Tesla promised the new Roadster was just a few years away. It collected $50,000 deposits from prospective customers of the car, which had an estimated base price of around $200,000. Some people even paid the company $250,000 to reserve one of 1,000 “Founders Series” versions of the supercar.

The project languished for years, until Musk reportedly tasked the Tesla team with redesigning the second-generation Roadster, and committed to the idea of using the SpaceX thrusters.

The promise of something outrageous like a flying car hasn’t been enough to tame critics of Musk and Tesla. Last year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote on X that “7.5 years has felt like a long time to wait” for his own new Roadster, though Musk claimed Altman had gotten a refund.

Much like the Roadster will be at this event, the ship date for the vehicle is up in the air. Musk himself has said he expects it to take a year or more before the new Roadster goes into production after it is finally revealed.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.

>

Continue Reading

Trending

Copyright © 2017 Zox News Theme. Theme by MVP Themes, powered by WordPress.