Autonomous trucking venture Plus Automation is inching closer to a Nasdaq listing via a merger with a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC). The leaders of Churchill Capital Corp. IX, which last June agreed to merge with 10-year-old PlusAI, rescheduled the shareholders’ meeting to approve the deal to February 11 from February 3 last week.
Churchill officials said the short delay would allow them to speak more with investors about PlusAI’s expanded partnership with Traton—the parent of U.S.-based truckmaker International Motors and Europe's Scania and MAN—which has been aligned with PlusAI since 2024. The new deal, the companies announced, involves Traton investing up to $25 million in PlusAI to advance research and development of its SuperDrive software.
The two companies have also agreed to expand the trial they are running in the Dallas-Houston-San Antonio triangle and to market their partnership to other fleets. As part of its investment, Traton can also nominate a PlusAI board member and is in line to receive PlusAI stock warrants linked to the AI company generating its first sales.
“We’ve moved autonomy from the lab to factory integration and now to real-world operations,” David Liu, CEO and co-founder of PlusAI, said in a statement about the Traton deal. “We now have a common Level 4 software stack operating in Europe and the U.S., proven integration on truck platforms of Traton’s brands, successful driverless validation, and customer pilots underway. The expanded partnership allows us to build on this momentum and accelerate towards scaled commercial deployment.”
Speaking last week on an episode of the Unusual Whales podcast that PlusAI sponsored, Liu said he expects the company to raise “a few hundred million dollars in capital” via the Churchill deal and added that the funding would let his team get to a commercial launch of its products without needing more money. PlusAI’s business model, he said, requires less capital spending and will need about $300 million in funding to break even.
“We’re looking at, you know, transforming a trillion-dollar market,” Liu said during the conversation, a transcript of which is here. “It’s a very, very capital-efficient way to make a huge impact in a huge market.”
Assuming Churchill shareholders approve the PlusAI plan, Liu and his team will join Kodiak AI on the Nasdaq—and will have taken the same SPAC path to get there. Kodiak, which a month ago said it was partnering with Bosch to source some of its hardware, is now worth nearly about $1.7 billion.
