Greetings. Welcome to the Aurora Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2021 Business Review Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. [Operator Instructions] Please note this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Stacy Feit, Vice President of Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our fourth quarter and full year 2021 business review call. At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later we will conduct a question-and-answer session and instructions will be given at that time. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. We announced our results earlier this afternoon. Our shareholder letter and a presentation to accompany this call are available on our Investor Relations website at ir.aurora.tech and we're furnished with our Form 8-K file today with the SEC. On the call today are Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO; and Richard Tame, CFO. Chris will provide an update on the progress we have made across the key pillars of our business, and Richard will recap our 2021 financial results. We will then open the call to Q&A. A recording of this conference call will be available on our Investor Relations website at ir.aurora.tech shortly after the call has ended. I'd like to take this opportunity to remind you that during the call, we will be making forward-looking statements. This includes statements relating to the expected performance of our business, future financial results and guidance, strategy, long-term growth and overall future prospects. These statements are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected or implied during this call. In particular, those described in our risk factors included in our Form S-1 filed by us with the SEC on November 12, 2021 and our Form 10-K for the full year 2021 that will be filed by March 31, 2022, as well as the current uncertainty and unpredictability in our business, the markets and economy. You should not rely on our forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. All forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on assumptions and beliefs as of the date hereof and Aurora disclaims any obligation to update any forward-looking statements, except as required by law. Our discussion today will include non-GAAP financial measures. These non-GAAP measures should be considered in addition to and not as a substitute for or an isolation from our GAAP results. Information regarding our non-GAAP financial results, including a reconciliation of our historical GAAP to non-GAAP results may be found in our shareholder letter, which was furnished with our Form 8-K filed today with the SEC and may also be found on our Investor Relations website. With that, I will now turn the call over to Chris.

Thank you Stacy and welcome everyone to our first business review call. Today, we are pleased to share our fourth quarter and full year results for the first time as a publicly traded company. 2021 was an incredible and transformative year for Aurora. We acquired Uber self-driving vehicle business, which brought an incredible team of talent and important technology to Aurora. We solidified a number of powerful partnerships and pilots. We partnered with two of the top three North American Truck OEMs with PACCAR and Volvo, we’re the number one carrier in the US with FedEx with Uber Freight, a transformative logistics platform, we’re the number one ride hailing platform with Uber and we're the number one auto OEM with Toyota. We continue to advance our cutting-edge technology. We're making progress on our sensor suite, which includes our proprietary FirstLight Lidar, our Aurora Driver software and with on-road and virtual testing. We introduced Aurora Horizon, our trucking product and Aurora Connect, our ride-hailing product, both of which are underpinned by the Aurora Driver. And of course, we took our company public. Already in 2022, we have continued to make powerful progress through our development and in our partnerships and pilots, as we work towards the launch of our autonomous trucking business in late 2023 and our ride-hailing business in late 2024. Before we talk more about our progress, I'd like to take a moment to share why we founded Aurora. Together, Drew Sterling and I founded Aurora five years ago because we saw an incredible opportunity to deliver the benefits of self driving technology safely, quickly and broadly. We believe in the meaningful impact self driving vehicles will deliver to our society and we saw a path to bring self driving technology to market, focus first on safety, then speed,…

Thank you, Chris. 2021 was a capstone year financially for Aurora. As Chris mentioned, to kick off the year, we acquired ATG, Uber self-driving vehicle business, which further bolstered our technology stack and gave us the depth and breadth of talent to better tackle the complex challenge of developing a scalable self-driving product. As part of this transaction, we received $400 million to capitalize the combined company. This transaction also had a one-time impact on our reported stock-based compensation that I will review in a moment. During 2021, we had $83 million in collaboration revenue, the development work on the CNA [ph] platform associated with our agreement with Toyota. This work will ultimately support the launch of our product for the ride hailing space. As a reminder this collaboration revenue is recognized using the input measure of hours expended as a percentage of total estimated hours to complete the project. Operating expenses, including stock-based compensation totaled $813 million, excluding both ongoing and acquisition-related stock-based compensation of $92 million and $128 million, respectively operating expenses totaled $593 million. Within operating expenses, R&D expenses, excluding $206 million in stock-based compensation totaled $491 million, primarily comprised of personnel costs as we continue to invest in our industry leading autonomy work. SG&A expenses, excluding $13 million in stock-based compensation were $102 million, which included costs associated with building a public company infrastructure. There are two items I want to flag on stock-based compensation, which are reflected in the reconciliation that we provided in the non-GAAP financials in the shareholder letter that we have posted to our Investor Relations website and furnished with a Form 8-K file today with the SEC. First, on a full year basis, $128 million of the $220 million stock-based compensation presented is one-time in nature related to our acquisition of…

Thank you. At this time, we will be conducting a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Steven Fox with Fox Advisors. Please proceed with your question.

Hi. Good afternoon, and congratulations on all you've accomplished this year. Chris, I was wondering if you can maybe talk a little bit about digitally enabled fleets. You had the announcement this past week. And you at the Uber meeting last week, Uber Freight highlighted some of the hopes for autonomy. How those opportunities do you think differ in time-wise and revenue-wise for Aurora versus say traditional methods of trucking? And then I had a follow-up.

Thanks, Steve. Appreciate the question. So as we think about this, what we're trying to do over the next -- over this pilot period and expiration period with our partners is understand the unique needs of each of the different segments of the freight space. And so we're really excited to have the partnerships with US Xpress, with Uber Freight, with FedEx and we look forward to learning from them as we move forward. We're excited about the technologies that the US Xpress is bringing to bear through Variant. And we look forward to offering their customers and other customers the benefit of the understanding we get through that.

Great. I appreciate that. And then in terms of just some maybe checks we should be looking for in terms of progresses here. You didn't mention demoing the fail-safe on roads later, I guess, this -- sometime this year. Can you just sort of talk about what you have to do to get from where you currently are with doing that in the cloud and online to doing it on the open road?

Yes. We -- so we're excited about the things we have in front of us this year. So, at the end of Q1, we anticipate showcasing the transferability. This is one of the core kind of architectural choices we made with the Aurora drivers, enabling it to operate both trucks and light vehicles. In Q3, we anticipate showcasing one of these very important elements of bringing the vehicle to a safe stop. We’ve shared our Safety Case Framework and one element of that is fail safety. And part of that is being able to understand when to trigger and then actually having the capability on the vehicle to bring it to a stop and this is a significant milestone in the development of it. Today, we're running this in simulation. We're doing early work on vehicles in close test courses. And between now and the time where we're going to showcase this on public roads, we'll be continuing to advance that capability. Enhancing the fault detection capability we have on board the vehicle to handle a more large broad set of problems that we can that might occur at some point in the future, so that we can operate safely

Great. That's helpful. I'll jump back in the queue. Thanks.

Thank you.

Our next question comes from the line of Tom White with D.A. Davidson. Please proceed with your question.

Great, thanks, guys. Congrats on your first public company earnings call. I guess we'll have to wait 12 months for the next one of these, it sounds like though. Two, if I may. Chris, you talked about some of the different kind of milestones and kind of markers of progress here over the next several months. I guess, I'm curious to hear your updated thoughts on the usefulness of metrics for investors, like things like real world, miles driven or maybe miles driven without a human intervention. You know, do you think those are useful things for investors to try and track or do you guys anticipate maybe at any point in the future publishing sort of a regular metric. And then could you just double click on the comments around that the non-binding indications of interest. I'm just curious, has the pace of that really picked up in in recent months or is it been kind of healthy all along and curious whether it might cause you guys to kind of increase your pace of investment or the urgency of investment to make sure you don't – you know that you take advantage of all that interest? Thanks.

Sure. And maybe I can just speak so on the timing of calls. We do anticipate providing more regular, roughly quarterly updates on the business. I think the depth of the financial disclosures that is where we intend to do that on an annual basis. So have no fear, we look forward to – to engaging more often than once a year. We think we're making exciting progress and we look forward to the opportunity to share that with anyone who joins us. On the metrics front, so there's a lot to unpack there. As we think about metrics, we continue to think that the disengagement report work that I put out there is as many people not just as believe is, is just not a super, super useful indication. As we've shared repeatedly, we think there's an immense amount of value in simulation. We leverage that dramatically. And we do orders and orders of magnitude more testing and simulation than we would do on physical road because it allows us to do much more focused testing. It allows us to do more efficient testing, and it allows us to test things that we just wouldn't encounter by just operating trucks out on the public roads. And so that can give us more confidence in the ultimate safety of our vehicle. We do – we've been trying to – we've heard the investment community around the need to provide progress and metrics of progress and we're continuing to try to find a good way to express that. We think there's something around the way we talk about the maturity of the product and look for us to try and share more of that in the near future. So stay tuned, I guess on that one. On the – the non-binding…

Great. Thanks, guys.

Thank you, Tom.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from the line of David Vernon with Bernstein. Please proceed with your question.

Hey, good afternoon, and thanks for taking the time. Chris, understand or get your updated thoughts on your expectations for when in a particular sort of use case looking for example, FedEx, where you're running between El Paso and Dallas, when you might be able to be taking some of the – the support capabilities of this the safety driver and safety engineer that kind of stuff out of the truck. I'm just trying to think from a big picture standpoint. How's your thinking on the timing of when you may be able to validate the technology without a driver in the cab changing right now?

Yeah. So we continue to work towards a commercial launch of the trucking product at the end of 2023. And we're excited about the progress towards that. Our philosophy on this really is one of continuous advancement, and that at any given moment, there's a – there's kind of a duration of which the vehicle could operate without oversight. But until we get to the point, where it's continuously viable, and doable in a commercially relevant way. It feels like it just doesn't make a lot of sense, right? If we have to operate our trucks with, you know, three, five other vehicles surrounding them to be able to do it safely. It's just kind of distracting from the core objective of addressing these, increasingly rare events that hold up operation until we're ready to do that and meet that acceptably safe bar. It feels like the most practical, efficient and safe way to do the development and testing is to have an operator in the vehicle instead of kind of five of them strewn about the highway around the vehicle.

Okay. So it sounds like the 2023 is still what you're looking for there. And then maybe as a follow-up, Richard, could you help us understand kind of the clean cash burn rate, I'm not sure, if the stock based comp charges that you had for the Uber stuff would have affected the underlying cash burn rate in 4Q? And can you give us a sense for where you intend to be exiting fiscal 2022 app, I’m just trying to get a sense for what we should be expecting in terms of cash burn for 2022?

Sure. So I think to the second point first, we don't think there's a revenue company that it's meaningful to provide the forward-looking guidance, so we won't speak to that. The cash flow is relatively clean from the Uber RSU perspective, obviously, shows up in the non-GAAP reconciliation for stock-based compensation there. But I think we had $563 million of operating cash spend and $48 million on CapEx that's basically clean cash flow for full year of 2021. And then in quarter four, I think that's what we have and we can follow-up.

Okay. I appreciate the same that you don't want to give too much guidance right here. But I guess, if you were to think about it, just directionally, are their investments in R&D and a step-up in OpEx that we should be expecting that is going to make that number get worse? Is it going to get better? Just anything directionally you can give us on that would be helpful?

Yeah, I think the directional thing is that we have $1.6 billion of cash on the balance sheet at the end of the year, and as we work towards launching the product at the end of 2023 trucking, we feel like we've got enough cash we believe we can get through the commercialization and then into 2024.

All right. Thanks guys.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have reached the end of the question-and-answer session. This concludes today's conference and you may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation and have a wonderful day.