Last week we announced a partnership with Ike, a new self-driving truck company led by industry veterans in engineering, autonomy, and product — a real dream team of autonomous trucking.

The deal was this: we gave Ike a copy of our autonomy and infrastructure software and, in exchange, Nuro got an equity stake in Ike. While we are separate companies, we will stay friendly and are rooting for each other’s success.

We never planned on licensing our technology — in fact as far as we know this deal is the first of its kind in the self-driving world. But when we saw how our technology could help Ike, paired with our belief in the team that Alden, Nancy and Jur had assembled, it was an easy decision.