Kodiak Robotics secures nearly $100M in new funding ahead of SPAC merger, public debut

The backers of autonomous trucking venture Kodiak Robotics and the publicly traded company planning to merge with it have secured nearly $100 million in new funding commitments days before they plan to close their deal.

Kodiak leaders announced in mid-April that they would join forces with Ares Acquisition Corp. II, a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC), and thus go public on the New York Stock Exchange. Ares shareholders will convene on Sept. 23 to vote on the planned merger. If they approve of the deal, Kodiak officials say they expect the company’s first day as a public company to be September 25.

Clearly, not everything has been on hold in the run-up to that vote. Kodiak and Ares executives recently announced that they have secured another $145 million worth of funding commitments from accredited investors, who have indicated that they will purchase convertible preferred Ares stock and common Ares stock warrants. Included in that $145 million, they noted, is $50 million from one investor that had previously been earmarked for Ares common stock.

“We believe these additional investments underscore our investors’ confidence in the value proposition of Kodiak’s safe and commercially-deployed autonomous technology,” Don Burnette, Kodiak’s founder and CEO, said in a statement. “We look forward to leading the advancement of the commercial trucking and public sector industries and delivering on the exciting value creation opportunities ahead to the benefit of customers and shareholders.”

The new funding commitments bring the total Ares and Kodiak have secured since April to about $220 million. The post-merger Kodiak also had been in line receive the lion’s share of the more than $560 million in cash held in an Ares trust account but the companies said early on Sept. 23 that shareholder redemptions have reduced that figure to about $63 million.

The proposed combination this spring placed a roughly $2.5 billion value on seven-year-old Kodiak, which at the time had already logged more than 2.6 million autonomous miles in real-world conditions in Texas’ Permian Basin oil region and elsewhere. The company has partnered with several fleets, including C.R. England, J.B. Hunt, and Werner Enterprises.

“Kodiak continues to differentiate itself as an industry leader in a significant addressable market,” Allyson Satin, COO of AACT and a partner at Ares. This investment firm sponsors the Ares Acquisition Corp. II SPAC. “Don and his team have demonstrated the long-term potential for Kodiak’s AI-driven technology, and we look forward to continuing to support the company through its next chapter.”

Once the planned union with Ares is completed, Kodiak’s shares will trade under the ticker symbol KDK.