What differentiates Kodiak Robotics from its competitors?
Kodiak is differentiating itself by listening to our customers and bringing products to the market which address their concerns. For example, when talking to the trucking industry, you realize that they have to be extremely efficient when it comes to maintenance as they have to keep heavy-duty trucks running almost continuously - approximately 11 hours a day, day in and day out. This puts significant wear and tear on the systems, but trucking companies only make money when their trucks are running. When we started talking to the trucking industry, they did not ask us about our technology such as our lidar or camera vision, but rather how they can keep their trucks rolling when there is an issue with our system as they cannot afford any downtime. We took that concern to heart and developed a bespoke proprietary modular autonomy system that can be outfitted on any manufacturer’s truck, is easy to install, and is easy to maintain in the field by non-trained or specialized technicians. For example, if a camera fails in the field, we have proprietary pre-calibrated sensor pods which are put on three connectors and your truck is ready to go in under 10 minutes, faster than you can change a tire.
We are also addressing the broad scale of the highway system in a unique and novel way with our lightweight mapping technology. We are the only company not relying on high-definition maps which are expensive, cumbersome, and time-consuming to build. Our maps are lightweight, our trucks are always mapping as they are driving, and we can send updates to our maps over the air and distribute those to our fleet within minutes. This combined with the modularity of our solutions has allowed Kodiak to expand our footprint dramatically and we currently have the largest freight network of any company, including partners such as Werner Enterprises, US Xpress, CEVA Logistics, and Forward. We are the only company that is regularly driving farther than any one driver can drive in a day and doing it continuously with our autonomous solution.
Can you speak to the challenge of talent sourcing in today’s technologically advanced world?
Sourcing talent has been challenging and the difficulty of finding the right talent changes over the years. Kodiak believes that keeping the caliber and quality of our people extremely high, hiring only the most experienced people, especially on the engineering side, putting them in an environment that is positive, supportive, and collaborative, with an extremely focused mission, and then giving them the freedom to run, unblocks people and creates room for creativity and innovation. We have kept our team small relative to the rest of the industry but are competing head-to-head with anybody else, and are in a leading position when it comes to technology, commercial traction, and the extent of our network. Giving people flexibility and the opportunity to have a high impact across the team and the company is extremely attractive to the highest quality candidates and is what has allowed Kodiak to effectively build the best team in the industry.
What are the main challenges Kodiak will face in the coming years?
Getting to a driverless solution is one of the biggest challenges for any AV company at our stage. Kodiak is already doing driverless but on closed courses and not public roads.
We expect to have driverless in the next several years and the challenge will then be - how do we convert that driverless solution into a product that is efficient and valuable in the marketplace. By listening to our customers, we are confident that we are building the right solution, KodiakDriver, which will be the solution of choice for the industry.
What is Kodiak’s growth strategy and how do you see the company evolving?
Kodiak offers two services. KodiakExpress is where we have our fleet with our drivers operating in a third-party capacity to our partner fleets. We work with partners, such as Werner Enterprises, and move freight on behalf of them through their brokerage system, but with our trucks. We are scaling this service to let our partners see and experience what our solutions can do and also to use our trucks to explore new areas to grow into and to facilitate the R&D we need to do to make the trucks better and safer. Our fleet is always gathering data and learning from every experience it has. As this service grows, the rate and pace of learning will accelerate.
Our KodiakDriver service is where we will supply the system - the software, sensors, and the compute platform - to truckload carriers, and they will operate their fleets and do the logistics aspects of the business themselves. We will monitor the systems for them and ensure that the trucks get from A to B safely and on time, but we are not going to be a part of the actual trucking business. Our ultimate goal is to be a tech provider to the automotive industry, but this does not yet make sense until we have a driverless solution that we envision rolling out in 2025.
