Kodiak AI will deliver 75 self-driving trucks to freight company DTL Transport starting in 2028. It’s the company’s first binding commercial deal for driverless big rigs that will run on public highways.
The contract, announced Wednesday, comes just ahead of Kodiak’s next big milestone: pulling human safety operators out of the cab to begin operating a driverless highway service in December. The company, which went public in September 2025, plans to launch that service by carrying goods for Ikea on Interstate 45 between Dallas and Houston.
DTL Transport, a California mid-market trucking company that hauls fresh produce and goods to grocery chains, plans to use the self-driving trucks on multiple interstate highway routes, starting with Dallas to El Paso, Texas, and Interstate 20 between Dallas and Atlanta. Kodiak has already conducted testing and operations on those two routes.
“One of the things that we love about mid-market carriers (like DTL) is that they are able to move with fast execution speed, much more at the speed of a startup or a small company or a tech company like Kodiak, and that they just want to get stuff done,” Kodiak founder and CEO Don Burnette told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview. “It’s easier for them to integrate into their fleet because they’re not as large, and we think that this is a real turning point for the self-driving industry in general.”
The contract should give Kodiak a revenue boost and a positive benchmark. Its shares have fallen 87% from their opening-day price. It also puts Kodiak on a path to become an “asset-light” technology supplier, meaning it would sell its technology rather than own and run trucks itself — a goal it shares with competitor Aurora Innovation.
Today, Kodiak has a number of customers under a Trucking-as-a-Service (TaaS) model, including Charger USA, Roehl Transport, and Werner Enterprises. Under this business model, Kodiak owns and operates the self-driving trucks as a third-party carrier on behalf of other companies. It currently carries freight for these companies on a few routes in Texas. Kodiak generates revenue carrying freight daily for these companies on three active routes, but Burnette described these operations as still being in pilot stage.
Ultimately, Kodiak wants to move to a Driver-as-a-Service (DaaS) model, in which customers own and operate the trucks. Kodiak licenses its technology, charging customers by the mile for the duration of the contract. DTL is Kodiak’s first on-highway DaaS customer, a relationship that was forged during a pilot program last month in California. In that pilot, Kodiak autonomously hauled perishable goods for DTL about 225 miles along Interstate 5 and California State Route 99 between Fresno, California, and Los Angeles, with a human safety operator behind the wheel.
“You have to prove out the technology first using your own truck, show them that it works, show them that it’s safe, show them that it integrates,” Burnette said, describing the Trucking-as-a-Service model. “And then we want to be asset light. We don’t want to be in the business of running a trucking company.”
Atlas Energy Solutions has been a Driver-as-a-Service customer since 2024. Technically, Atlas was Kodiak’s first customer under a binding commercial contract, but its driverless trucks operate in off-road settings in West Texas’ remote Permian Basin. Atlas currently owns and operates 35 driverless trucks equipped with Kodiak’s self-driving system. Burnette said Kodiak is on track to have as many as 100 in service there by mid-2027.
Kodiak didn’t reveal the value of the deal with DTL Transport. However, its public 2025 investor presentation offers some clues about the contract’s potential value.
In that document, Kodiak forecast annual recurring revenue of $150,000 to $190,000 per truck. That forecast rests on several assumptions, including a per-mile licensing fee of about $0.97 (in line with current human driver costs per mile), annual mileage of about 225,000 miles a year per truck, and other factors.
Assuming those projections bear out, the deal with DTL Transport could generate at least about $11.2 million in annual recurring revenue once all 75 trucks are delivered.
Source: techcrunch.com
