Autonomous vehicle tech firm Aurora lays off 3% of workforce

Autonomous vehicle technology company Aurora Innovation has laid off three per cent of its workforce at the start of this year, the media reported. As per the company, Aurora employed about 1,800 employees as of the end of 2023, reports TechCrunch. “As we move toward commercial launch, we recently reviewed the entire organisation to ensure we are working as effectively as possible and with the velocity required to achieve our ambitious goals,” Aurora's senior vice president of people Cristopher Barrett, was quoted as saying. “Through this process, a limited number of roles were eliminated which impacted 3 per cent of our total workforce. During the recent market uncertainty, we have been incredibly thoughtful in our resourcing to minimise such actions," he added.

The layoffs come as Aurora is planning to deploy self-driving trucks that can navigate US highways without a human driver. By the end of 2024, the company hopes to introduce up to 20 driverless Class 8 trucks, the report noted. Aurora, a company founded in 2017 by former employees of Tesla, Uber, and Waymo, has gone public to secure the necessary funding for the commercialisation of their cutting-edge technology.

In 2021, Aurora became a publicly traded company after merging with a special purpose acquisition company initiated by LinkedIn co-founder and investor Reid Hoffman, Mark Pincus, the founder of Zynga, and Michael Thompson, a managing partner. Meanwhile, the US-based leading e-commerce platform for buying and selling used vehicles Vroom has announced that it is discontinuing its e-commerce operations and winding down its used vehicle dealership business to preserve liquidity and enable the company to maximise stakeholder value through its remaining businesses.
As part of a plan, the company expects that approximately 800 employees will be laid off, which is about 90 per cent of the total workforce.