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  "documentTitle": "Aurora Innovation, Inc. (AUR)",
  "authorId": "53_Kerrisdale_Capital",
  "authorName": "Kerrisdale Capital",
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  "presentationDate": "2025-08-01 00:00:00",
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  "notes": "This slide serves as a bearish argument against Aurora's valuation by comparing it to leaner competitors and questioning the total addressable market size.",
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      "text": "That's where we expect Aurora to trade, and where we believe it will as the limits on autonomous trucking become clear and the air comes out of the tires of autonomous hype.",
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      "text": "The picture that emerges from the above is a competitive landscape in which several different autonomous software companies and OEMs are competing for what is, in our view, a very narrow long-haul hub-and-spoke freight market. While Aurora is ahead from a software perspective, it's not that far ahead and it's been scaling slowly. We believe it's only a matter of time before other competitors join the fray. In that context, Aurora is just one company vying for the software portion of what we estimate to be a $10 billion market comprised of software, hardware, and logistics services. Even if it were the only company, the typical valuation of a company like that is in the sub-$1 billion small cap range. That's where we expect Aurora to trade, and where we believe it will as the limits on autonomous trucking become clear and the air comes out of the tires of autonomous hype.",
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      "text": "Waabi is another competitor worth mentioning, particularly as one of its major investors has been Volvo, Aurora's primary OEM partner. Volvo has been adamant that it sees self-driving technology as a kind of “Tier-1 component” and as such is encouraging the presence of several suppliers. Waabi's approach has been to build an end-to-end software architecture, but unlike Tesla and Wayve, using a variety of sensory modalities including cameras, radar, and lidar. The common theme between Waabi and Kodiak is that given the low human-capital-intensity of the autonomous software they’re building, their expense structures are much lower than Aurora’s, with Kodiak's 2024 R&D merely 6-7% of Aurora's (Waabi doesn't have public financials, but has raised only a few hundred million dollars in its history and has fewer than 200 employees compared to Aurora's 1800).",
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