Kodiak AI, the Mountain View autonomous trucking company, signed what TechCrunch called its first binding commercial deal for driverless big rigs on public highways on Oct 28. The customer is DTL Transport, a family-run carrier based in Fresno, and the order covers 75 self-driving trucks starting in 2028. For anyone building in physical AI around the Bay Area, the deal is worth studying for how Kodiak structured it, since its business model is one other robotics founders can borrow.
What Kodiak and DTL agreed to
DTL becomes Kodiak's first on-highway customer for what the company calls Driver-as-a-Service. Under this setup, DTL owns and operates the trucks and pays Kodiak a fee for every mile its software drives. Kodiak didn't disclose the value of the contract, but TechCrunch estimated it at roughly $11.2 million a year or more once all 75 trucks are running, based on figures in Kodiak's 2025 investor deck of about $0.97 per mile and around 225,000 miles per truck each year.
According to FreightWaves, DTL has hauled dry and refrigerated freight for more than 36 years, runs more than 100 trucks and specializes in cross-country team runs for grocers. The trucks will run on lanes Kodiak has already tested, Dallas to El Paso on I-10 and the I-20 corridor between Dallas and Atlanta, as Truck News reported. Team runs are a smart starting point because federal hours-of-service rules cap a solo driver at 11 hours of driving within a 14-hour window, and a truck without a driver doesn't need to stop for that.
"We don't want to be in the business of running a trucking company," Kodiak founder and CEO Don Burnette told TechCrunch, describing the deal as "a real turning point for the self-driving industry in general." DTL president and CEO Lucky Dosanjh said in the announcement the technology lets the carrier "expand capacity, enhance safety, and drive innovation forward."
The California pilot that came first
The contract grew out of a pilot closer to home. Starting Sept 22, Kodiak hauled DTL produce about 225 miles from Fresno to a Los Angeles distribution center on SR-99 and I-5, with a safety driver on board under a California DMV testing permit issued Aug 13. Trucking Info reported that Kodiak describes those loads as the first commercial goods autonomously hauled by a Class 8 truck in California.
Kodiak's other customers show how the company has been testing different models side by side. Charger USA, Roehl Transport and Werner Enterprises use its Trucking-as-a-Service option, where Kodiak owns and runs the trucks itself on 3 Texas routes that Burnette still describes as pilots. Atlas Energy Solutions has used Driver-as-a-Service off-road in the Permian Basin since 2024, with 35 trucks running now and up to 100 expected by mid-2027, per TechCrunch.
Why the business model matters for robotics founders
If you're building robots in the South Bay, the hardest question after "does it work" is usually "who owns the hardware." Owning fleets means raising capital for equipment, hiring operators and carrying maintenance costs, which turns a software company into a logistics company with thinner margins. Licensing per mile lets Kodiak scale with its customers' fleets instead of its own balance sheet, and TechCrunch noted that Aurora Innovation is pursuing a similar asset-light approach.
The same logic applies well beyond trucking. Warehouse robot makers, construction automation startups and service robot companies all face a choice between selling units, leasing them or charging per task. We covered how much money flowed into the sector in our breakdown of robotics startup funding in Q3 2026, and the Kodiak deal shows what investors want to see next, which is customers signing multi-year contracts paid by usage. For early teams, it's also a reminder your first enterprise contract often starts as a narrow pilot, a pattern we walked through in our guide to founder-led sales and landing your first customers.
What to watch next
Kodiak has a few dates coming up. It plans to pull safety operators and launch driverless highway service in December, hauling IKEA freight on I-45 between Dallas and Houston, though it still has to finish its long-haul safety case first. FreightWaves reported that IKEA was named the launch partner on Oct 1 and that Kodiak has logged nearly 4 million autonomous miles over more than 7 years. The company also reports third-quarter results on Nov 5, which should give a clearer picture of how many driverless hours its customers are buying.
For Bay Area engineers, this kind of deal tends to show up in hiring before it shows up on highways. Safety case work, fleet operations software and remote assistance tooling all need people, and much of it happens in the Bay Area. Another physical AI company we've followed closely is the one behind the Bedrock Robotics $600M Series C, which is bringing autonomy to construction equipment.
Where Mountain View's physical AI crowd meets
Kodiak's home base sits in one of the densest clusters of autonomy talent anywhere, and plenty of the people building these systems would rather swap notes in person than over a LinkedIn message. Our Physical AI & Robotics Mixer at Circuit Launch in Mountain View in October was built for exactly that crowd, and South Bay Renaissance, the Tribe-organized effort to rebuild the South Bay and Peninsula startup scene one gathering at a time, runs a hardware and robotics interest group for builders from San Mateo down to San Jose. If you want a broader map, our roundup of robotics meetups in the Bay Area covers the regular clubs and conferences.
If autonomy and robotics are your thing, the Futurists in Robotics Tribe is where members trade links on deals like this one and argue about which model wins. You can also follow the Tribe Events calendar on Luma to catch the next founder dinner, demo night or physical AI talk as soon as it's posted.
