Autonomous company TuSimple Inc. revealed the paperwork for its initial public offering on Tuesday, showing that it lost more than $ 300 million in the past three years in the race to be the first to launch fully autonomous long-haul trucks.
TuSimple had previously filed for a confidential IPO, The Wall Street Journal reported, and Tuesday’s filing offered the public the first detailed look at a startup that attracted more funding than many of its Silicon Valley counterparts. and maintained split operations in California and China.
Its connections with China caught the attention of US regulators. The U.S. Foreign Investment Committee, or Cfius, identified TuSimple as a company that deserves review because of its ties to China and because autonomous driving technology is considered a critical technology for the Department of Defense. Cfius warned TuSimple this month that it was looking into a Chinese investment in the company as of 2017, according to the IPO request.
TuSimple, which was founded in 2015, has amassed a workforce of around 800 and raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors. The company posted revenue of $ 1.8 million last year and a net loss of $ 177.9 million, according to the document, reflecting how it is still in the early stages of commercial technology development.
So far, TuSimple has made money as a traditional cargo carrier, not selling its autonomous driving technology ready in 2024. It has customer reservations for more than 5,700 trucks, although they are not equivalent to sales revenue.