More than 100,000 times, a trailer has moved from a parking spot to a loading dock without a driver behind the wheel. The location is a private yard, not a public road. The vehicle is an electric yard truck. The company counting those moves is Outrider, a Golden, Colorado-based robotics firm that has raised a quarter-billion dollars to automate the most repetitive and hazardous corner of logistics.
Founded in 2017, Outrider sells an integrated system of self-driving electric yard trucks, management software, and robotic trailer-hitching. The company now has 194 employees and is taking orders for deployments in 2026 and 2027 [FreightWaves] [CB Insights].
The Wedge of a Constrained Yard
Outrider’s focus is narrow by design. Its autonomous trucks operate only within the fenced boundaries of private logistics hubs. The system is triggered by a simple electronic message from a warehouse management system. An autonomous electric truck then locates the correct trailer, uses a robotic arm to connect air and electrical lines, hitches up, and completes the move [Perplexity Sonar Pro Brief].
Traction with Strategic Backers
Georgia-Pacific has used the Outrider system to complete more than 1,000 autonomous trailer moves at a Chicagoland distribution center [DC Velocity]. The company claims over 100,000 autonomous moves across all customer deployments and test sites [The Robot Report].
Strategic capital comes from logistics real estate giant Prologis Ventures and cold-storage leader Lineage Ventures. In October 2024, Outrider closed a $62 million Series D round led by Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT) and New Enterprise Associates (NEA), bringing total equity raised to approximately $250 million [Outrider] [TechFundingNews].
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| 2023 Series C | $73M |
| 2024 Series D | $62M |
| Total Raised | $250M |
The Founder’s Second Act in Trucking
CEO Andrew Smith is a repeat founder in the trucking adjacency space. His first company, ATDynamics, developed aerodynamic trailer devices called "TrailerTails" and was acquired by components maker STEMCO in 2015 [Perplexity Sonar Pro Brief].
The Next Twelve Months
The immediate milestone is the initial deployment of Outrider’s latest-generation driverless yard trucks, slated to begin with select enterprise customers in the second half of 2025 [CB Insights, FreightWaves].