Kodiak AI Lands Landmark 75-Truck Driverless Commercial Deal With DTL Transport, Marking Highway Self-Driving Industry Turning Point

Kodiak AI has locked in its first binding, public highway-focused commercial agreement for fully driverless big rigs, with plans to deliver 75 autonomous trucks to California-based freight carrier DTL Transport starting in 2028.

The contract, announced publicly Wednesday, drops just ahead of Kodiak’s next defining operational milestone: removing human safety operators from truck cabs to launch a fully driverless highway service in December. First deployments of that service will haul freight for Ikea along the Interstate 45 corridor connecting Dallas and Houston.

DTL Transport, a midmarket trucking firm that specializes in moving fresh produce and consumer goods to U.S. grocery chains, will deploy its fleet of Kodiak self-driving trucks across multiple interstate routes, starting with the Dallas-to-El Paso, Texas, corridor and Interstate 20 that runs between Dallas and Atlanta. Kodiak has already completed extensive testing and regular pre-commercial runs on both of these routes to validate performance.

“One of the biggest perks of partnering with mid-market carriers like DTL is their blazing fast execution speed — they operate at the same pace as a startup, small business, or tech firm like Kodiak, with no bloated, slow corporate red tape, and they just want to get work done,” Kodiak founder and CEO Don Burnette shared in an exclusive interview with TechCrunch. “Their smaller existing fleet also makes integrating our autonomous systems far simpler than it would be for a massive national carrier, and we think this partnership represents a genuine turning point for the broader self-driving truck industry.”

The new agreement is set to deliver a meaningful revenue boost for Kodiak, whose public shares have fallen 87% from their opening listing price after the firm went public in September 2025. It also puts Kodiak on a clear path to hit its long-stated goal of becoming an “asset-light” technology supplier — a target shared with competitor Aurora Innovation, under which the firm licenses its self-driving systems rather than owning and operating its own full fleet of trucks.

Right now, Kodiak runs its operations under a trucking-as-a-service (TaaS) model, with a roster of clients including Charger USA, Roehl Transport, and Werner Enterprises. Under this framework, Kodiak owns and operates all its self-driving trucks as a third-party freight carrier on behalf of its partners, currently running regular freight hauls across three active routes in Texas. The firm generates daily revenue from these hauls, though Burnette has emphasized these operations are still in the pilot validation stage.

Kodiak’s long-term target is to shift fully to a driver-as-a-service (DaaS) model, where customers own and maintain the physical trucks, while Kodiak licenses its autonomous technology and charges a per-mile fee for the full duration of the contract. DTL is Kodiak’s first ever on-highway DaaS customer, with the partnership forged after a successful month-long pilot in California last month: during that test, a Kodiak autonomous truck supervised by a human safety operator hauled perishable goods for DTL 225 miles along Interstate 5 and California State Route 99 between Fresno and Los Angeles.

“Using your own trucks to prove out the technology first under the TaaS model is a necessary first step: you have to show partners the system works, that it’s safe, that it integrates smoothly with their existing workflows,” Burnette explained. “Once you hit that proof point, you make the shift to an asset-light structure. We never wanted to run a traditional, capital-heavy trucking company long-term.”

Kodiak already has one existing DaaS customer, Atlas Energy Solutions, which signed on in 2024. Technically, Atlas was Kodiak’s first binding commercial DaaS client, but its Kodiak-equipped driverless trucks operate entirely in off-road settings in the remote Permian Basin of West Texas. Atlas currently owns and runs 35 of these autonomous rigs, and Burnette confirmed Kodiak is on track to expand that in-service fleet to 100 units in the Permian by mid-2027.

Kodiak has not disclosed the exact total value of the DTL Transport deal, but projections laid out in its 2025 public investor presentation point to a major recurring revenue stream. The firm forecasts annual recurring revenue of $150,000 to $190,000 per autonomous truck, based on core assumptions including a ~$0.97 per-mile licensing fee (aligned with current average per-mile costs for human truck drivers) and 225,000 total operating miles per truck every year. If those projections hold up, the full 75-truck DTL fleet will generate at minimum roughly $11.2 million in annual recurring revenue for Kodiak once all units are fully deployed.