Outrider

"Outrider automates the distribution yard, the stretch of pavement between the highway and the dock door where trailers are shuffled, parked and staged. The company was founded by Andrew Smith, who remains chief executive, and emerged from roughly two years of stealth development when it launched publicly on 19 February 2020. It operates from 9801 E 102nd Ave in Henderson, Colorado, north of Denver, having started in Golden, and runs an Advanced Testing Facility built as a 200,000 square foot distribution yard so that new behaviour is proven on a real yard rather than a track.

The offering is sold as a system rather than a vehicle: battery-electric autonomous yard trucks, management software, and the site infrastructure that ties them together. The trucks handle the full cycle of yard work without a driver, including backing a trailer into a dock, hitching and unhitching, raising and lowering landing gear, and connecting the trailer's brake air lines and electrical lines. That last step is the hard one, and Outrider does it with a patented robotic-arm mechanism, which is what distinguishes the system from yard trucks that can only move a trailer someone else has already coupled. Navigation uses multiple sensors for obstacle monitoring, AI route planning trained on proprietary yard-specific data, and a defined safe state when a hazard is detected, with multiple physical stop buttons for manual override. The management layer dispatches both autonomous and manually driven trucks in one queue, tracks trailer inventory in real time, re-queues tasks automatically and raises support requests, and the company provides 24/7 remote monitoring by its own engineers.

Safety is handled through a formal safety case process covering risk assessment, design and test completion and sign-off, drawing on multiple safety standards, backed by millions of simulated scenarios plus on-vehicle testing. The company states its system-safety team has over a century of combined experience across automotive, consumer, commercial, defence and industrial autonomy. No third-party certification is named publicly.

Customers are Fortune 500 shippers in package delivery, retail and e-commerce, consumer packaged goods and automotive; Georgia-Pacific was named among the early pilots. By the Series D announcement the company said its customers accounted for more than 20 percent of all yard trucks operating in North America and that it had completed over 100,000 autonomous trailer moves. Skip Robotics supplies algorithms behind part of the autonomy stack. Funding began with USD 53 million across seed and Series A rounds led by New Enterprise Associates and 8VC, and reached over USD 250 million in equity by the USD 62 million Series D closed on 24 October 2024, co-led by Koch Disruptive Technologies and NEA with 8VC, ARK Invest, Prologis Ventures, NVentures - NVIDIA's venture arm - B37 Ventures, FM Capital, Interwoven Ventures, Goose Capital, Lineage Ventures, Presidio Ventures and Service Provider Capital participating."