PLUS.AI

The story starts in Silicon Valley in 2016. A group of Stanford PhD graduates, led by David Liu and Shawn Kerrigan, looked at long-haul trucking and saw a problem worth solving with AI.

Trucking moves most of America's freight. Drivers are in short supply.

The job is brutal and the highway hours at 3am are dangerous. They figured software could handle the boring miles better than a tired human.

So they built a virtual driver for big rigs instead of chasing robotaxis like everyone else. The proof came in December 2019.

Their truck ran 2,800 miles from Tulare, California to Quakertown, Pennsylvania carrying Land O'Lakes butter. It finished in under three days.

It was one of the first real commercial freight runs done mostly by a self-driving truck.

Plus does not want to own trucks or run a freight company. It builds the software brain.

Truck makers install Plus technology at the factory. Fleets buy those trucks and pay Plus for the self-driving system.

Think of it like the difference between building cars and building the autopilot that goes inside them. Plus sells the autopilot.

It is called SuperDrive. Partners like Hyundai, TRATON, and IVECO build the actual trucks.

The pitch to fleets is simple. Fewer accidents.

Better fuel economy. Trucks that can run more hours without a human time limit.

The flagship is SuperDrive, the Level 4 self-driving system for heavy trucks. Level 4 means the truck can drive itself on the highway with no human ready to grab the wheel, inside set conditions.

Plus also sells PlusDrive, a driver-assist product fleets can use right now. PlusDrive keeps a human in the seat but handles steering, braking, and lane control on the highway.

It is the bridge product that pays the bills while SuperDrive gets ready for prime time.

Plus made one smart bet early. It did not try to remove the human driver overnight.

It started with driver-assist features that fleets could buy today, and made money while the full self-driving tech matured. That coast-to-coast butter run in 2019 was a marketing masterstroke.

Every trucking outlet on earth covered it. The other move was going factory-direct.

Instead of retrofitting old trucks one at a time, Plus partnered with manufacturers to build the tech in from the start. That is how you get to thousands of trucks instead of dozens.

Going public nearly broke them. In May 2021 Plus announced a SPAC merger with Hennessy Capital Investment Corp V at a $3.3 billion valuation.

By November 2021 it was dead. The reason was China.

Plus had big operations and backers there, and new Chinese rules on overseas listings scared everyone off. The deal collapsed with no winner and no breakup fee.

The bigger challenge is the one every self-driving company faces. You burn enormous amounts of cash while the technology slowly gets safe enough to actually remove the driver.

Rival TuSimple already imploded. Plus is now chasing a 2027 commercial launch.

The clock and the bank balance are both running down.

Plus raised around $720 million before trying to go public. Early money came from HSG, formerly Sequoia Capital China, plus Mayfield and China Growth Capital back in 2018.

A huge $286 million round followed in 2020, then a $220 million round in 2021. That mix of US and Chinese capital is exactly what later made the public listing so messy.

The newest backers lean more American. Wall Street dealmaker Michael Klein, through his Churchill Capital vehicle, and Hyundai are part of the latest plan to finally list the company.