IPOs and SPACs: How AV Companies Went Public in the Early 2020s

Aurora Innovation went public in 2021 by merging with a special purpose acquisition company rather than filing a traditional IPO prospectus. It wasn't alone. TuSimple and Embark Trucks, both betting on autonomous trucking rather than passenger robotaxis, took the same route around the same period, and for a stretch it looked like the SPAC merger had become the default way an autonomous-vehicle company reached public markets.

The mechanics of a SPAC merger are what made the shortcut possible in the first place. A special purpose acquisition company is already public, having raised a pool of cash through its own listing with no operating business behind it, just a mandate to find a private company to merge with inside a set window. When it merges with a private target, the target effectively steps into the SPAC's existing public listing rather than filing its own registration statement and pricing shares through underwriters the way a conventional IPO does. That structural shortcut is what let Aurora, TuSimple, and Embark reach public markets without running the traditional process end to end, and it's also why so much of the diligence a conventional IPO forces happens on a compressed, negotiated timeline rather than the extended one a roadshow imposes.

The appeal is straightforward enough. A traditional IPO asks a company to demonstrate revenue, or at least a credible near-term path to it, before institutional investors and retail markets take it seriously. Pre-revenue autonomous-vehicle developers, which described nearly all of them at that point, had no such story to tell. A SPAC merger sidesteps a lot of that scrutiny and gets a company listed faster, with valuation set through negotiation with the SPAC sponsor rather than a roadshow. That trade-off cuts both ways: less scrutiny going in generally means less of a public track record for investors to lean on once trading actually starts.

What happened after listing is where the story splits. Some of these companies kept operating, kept raising capital, and remain active participants in the industry today. Others wound down within a few years of their listing, having burned through the capital the SPAC merger raised without reaching anything resembling commercial scale. Autonomous trucking in particular turned out to be a harder business than the early optimism suggested, though not for lack of trying, and the split wasn't evenly distributed across the sector either.

The specific fates diverged in ways that go beyond a general note about winners and losers. Embark discontinued its trucking operations and wound the company down within a couple of years of its SPAC listing. TuSimple's decline took a different and more public shape: a federal national-security review into its ties to China-based operations, an extended stretch of executive turnover, and a substantial retreat from its US trucking ambitions, all playing out while the stock traded far below where it had listed. Aurora, by contrast, kept its US trucking program running and remains an active participant in the industry today, which makes it something closer to the exception inside its own IPO cohort than the rule.

The pattern isn't unique to companies that went public this way. Argo AI never went public at all and still shut down for reasons that echo through several of the SPAC-era wind-downs: the gap between demonstrating autonomy and running it profitably at scale stayed wider, for longer, than most of the capital raised in that wave anticipated. The ten-year retrospective tracks which of that cohort remain index constituents today and which have already dropped out.