Aurora Innovation financing

Crunched

Hi there,

On Tuesday, we caught a glimpse into Aurora Innovation‘s fundraising efforts, as our engine picked up an SEC filing under the company’s name. The Form D shows the startup has sold $3.1M of a $3.2M offering.

Aurora is of course the brainchild of Chris Urmson (ex-Google car/Waymo director) and Sterling Anderson (ex-Tesla Autopilot director), against which Tesla has filed suit for alleged theft of confidential information and employee poaching.

Some readers have asked how our platform captures these data points in real-time. CB Insights subscribers may already be familiar with the Cruncher that powers our data product, but for those of you who aren’t, we’ve written a primer on our team blog. 

If you’re interested in getting ahead of developments across automaking, transportation, and beyond, sign up for a free trial here.

Another filing caught by our data collection platform was for Wrightspeed, which has sold $8M of a $25M offering. Wrightspeed develops range-extended electric powertrains for heavy-duty applications.

This week in auto tech

Other news followed several trends we’ve discussed in recent issues:

• Computer vision & sensing remains hot, with DeepScale raising its seed round from a range of VCs
• The previously stealthy AutoX unveiled its camera-only self-driving system, joining a LiDAR-free club including Tesla, AImotive (fka AdasWorks), and Starsky Robotics
• Delivery robots from Marble and Starship Technologies continue development
• Newcomer “suppliers” like Microsoft and ARM continue pushing into the auto space

Many more tidbits in the blurb below.

Have a great rest of the week.

Kerry
@kerrygwu