Kodiak AI has secured a binding commercial agreement to supply 75 autonomous big rigs to DTL Transport beginning in 2028, marking the company's first contract for self-driving trucks that will travel on public highways. The deal, announced Wednesday by TechCrunch, arrives just before Kodiak's planned December launch of a driverless highway service, which will remove human safety operators from the vehicle cab for the first time. The publicly traded autonomous vehicle company, which debuted on markets in September 2025, intends to begin that service by transporting Ikea products along Interstate 45 connecting Dallas and Houston.
DTL Transport, a California-based midmarket trucking firm specializing in fresh produce and grocery deliveries, will deploy the autonomous trucks across several interstate routes, beginning with the Dallas-to-El Paso corridor and Interstate 20 linking Dallas with Atlanta. Kodiak has already completed testing and operations on both of these routes. The company didn't disclose the financial terms of the DTL arrangement, but a 2025 investor presentation provides clues about potential value. That document projected annual recurring revenue between $150,000 and $190,000 per truck, based on assumptions including a licensing fee near $0.97 per mile, roughly 225,000 miles traveled annually per vehicle, and additional factors. Using these estimates, the 75-truck DTL deal could generate approximately $11.2 million in yearly recurring revenue once full delivery is complete.
According to Kodiak founder and CEO Don Burnette, midmarket carriers like DTL offer advantages because they can "move with fast execution speed, much more at the speed of a startup or a small company or a tech company like Kodiak." The CEO told TechCrunch this represents "a real turning point for the self-driving industry in general." Burnette explained that the company's strategy involves first proving the technology through its own truck fleet before transitioning to become asset-light, noting, "We don't want to be in the business of running a trucking company." The relationship with DTL emerged from a pilot program last month in California, where Kodiak autonomously moved perishable goods roughly 225 miles between Fresno and Los Angeles along Interstate 5 and California State Route 99, with a human safety operator present.
The contract represents a strategic shift for Kodiak toward becoming a technology supplier rather than a fleet operator, a model the company calls driver-as-a-service, in which clients own and run the trucks while Kodiak licenses its system and charges by the mile. This stands in contrast to its current trucking-as-a-service model, where Kodiak owns and operates self-driving trucks as a third-party carrier for customers including Charger USA, Roehl Transport, and Werner Enterprises on Texas routes that Burnette described as still in pilot stage. While Atlas Energy Solutions has been a driver-as-a-service customer since 2024, operating 35 driverless trucks in West Texas's remote Permian Basin oil fields with plans to reach 100 vehicles by mid-2027, DTL marks Kodiak's first such customer for on-highway operations. The deal should provide Kodiak with a revenue boost and positive benchmark at a time when its shares have dropped 87% from their opening-day price, positioning the company on a path toward its goal of selling technology rather than managing truck operations. For an industry still struggling to prove commercial viability beyond controlled environments, the willingness of a grocery logistics operator to commit to dozens of autonomous vehicles signals growing confidence in real-world deployment, though the true test will come when those trucks operate without human backup on crowded interstates.