Kodiak signs first binding deal to supply 75 driverless trucks for public highways

Kodiak AI has signed its first binding commercial contract for driverless semi-trucks that will run on public highways. According to TechCrunch, the company will deliver 75 self-driving big rigs to freight carrier DTL Transport, with deliveries beginning in 2028.

The announcement, made Wednesday, arrives at a busy moment for Kodiak. The company, which went public in September 2025, plans to remove human safety operators from its vehicles in December and launch a fully driverless highway service carrying Ikea freight on Interstate 45 between Dallas and Houston.

The customer and the routes

DTL Transport is a mid-sized California trucking firm that moves fresh produce and other freight for grocery chains. It intends to deploy the autonomous trucks across several interstate corridors, starting with Dallas to El Paso, Texas, and Interstate 20 between Dallas and Atlanta — two routes on which Kodiak has already tested and operated.

The relationship grew out of a pilot in September, during which a Kodiak truck hauled perishable cargo roughly 225 miles between Fresno and Los Angeles along Interstate 5 and California State Route 99, with a human safety operator still in the cab.

Kodiak founder and CEO Don Burnette told TechCrunch that mid-market carriers make appealing partners because they can move quickly and fold new technology into their fleets with less friction than a large operator. "We think that this is a real turning point for the self-driving industry in general," he said.

From hauling freight to licensing technology

The DTL contract also marks a shift in how Kodiak expects to earn money. Today the company runs a Trucking-as-a-Service model: it owns and operates autonomous trucks as a third-party carrier for customers including Charger USA, Roehl Transport and Werner Enterprises, carrying freight daily on three active routes in Texas. Burnette described those operations as still being in the pilot stage.

Under the Driver-as-a-Service arrangement DTL has signed, customers own and operate the trucks while Kodiak licenses its self-driving system and charges by the mile for the life of the contract. DTL is Kodiak's first on-highway customer under that model. It is not, however, the company's first binding commercial customer: Atlas Energy Solutions has used Kodiak's system off-road in West Texas's Permian Basin since 2024 and currently runs 35 driverless trucks, a number Burnette said could reach 100 by mid-2027.

Kodiak frames the licensing approach as a path to becoming an "asset-light" technology supplier rather than a trucking operator — a goal TechCrunch notes it shares with competitor Aurora Innovation.

The money involved

Neither company disclosed the value of the contract. TechCrunch points to Kodiak's 2025 investor presentation, which forecast annual recurring revenue of $150,000 to $190,000 per truck. That projection rests on a licensing fee of roughly $0.97 per mile — roughly matching the per-mile cost of a human driver — plus annual mileage of about 225,000 miles per truck. If those assumptions hold, the 75-truck order could generate at least $11.2 million in annual recurring revenue once fully delivered.

The boost would be welcome. According to TechCrunch, Kodiak's shares have fallen 87 percent from their opening-day price.

Why it matters

Autonomous trucking firms have spent years demonstrating their systems with safety drivers on board. Binding orders for trucks intended to run driverless on public interstates are the commercial test that follows, and Kodiak's deal with DTL is among the first of its kind. It also sketches the business model the industry is converging on: selling autonomy by the mile to fleet owners rather than operating trucks directly. The caveats are significant — deliveries do not begin until 2028, Kodiak has not yet completed its first driver-out highway run, and the revenue projections depend on assumptions that may not hold. But with the December launch for Ikea approaching, the next few months will show whether the technology is ready to back up the paperwork.