Einride, a self-driving electric cargo transportation company, soared in its first day of trading on the Nasdaq. The company went public on Wednesday morning under the ticker symbol “.ENRD. ”
Einride stock was up more than 100% in Wednesday morning trading. Nasdaq suspended trading in the morning based on the “limit up/limit down” protocol triggered by sudden fluctuations in stock prices.
Einride’s pre-acquisition value had fallen to $1.35 billion after its SPAC deal with Legato Merger Corp. III received final shareholder approval last week, below the $1.8 billion set when the deal was first proposed last November.
The transaction resulted in $113 million in PIPE capital from institutional investors, including Stockholm-based EQT Ventures, and total proceeds of more than $200 million.
Founded in 2016, Einride provides cargo services for large, cabless, self-driving EV trucks and driver-operated electric trucks. The company’s technology can also be licensed to third parties, both as trip planning AI software and self-driving systems.
“Electric vehicles and self-driving will be the cheapest option for the majority of future freight transportation use cases,” Einride CEO Roosve Charli said in an interview on Squawk Box on Wednesday.
Einride currently has 200 EV cargo trucks running on its platform, and “we’re also seeing cost benefits,” Charli said. “We need to be more cost efficient and our customer implementations are already profitable today,” he added.
Einride has been named to CNBC’s Disruptor 50 list three times, most recently in 2025.
Einride cabless self-driving EV truck.
einride
Einride currently has more than 30 enterprise customers in seven countries and is expected to generate approximately $92 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) from signed agreements and over $800 million in potential long-term ARR from joint venture plans. Regulatory clearance has been obtained in the United States and Europe. About 200 electric vehicles are currently in use by customers including GE Appliances and Swedish online pharmacy company Apotea.
PepsiCo is one of the companies that has piloted the use of Einride cargo solutions in markets such as Germany and Memphis, Tennessee, USA. Heineken has added EV cargo routes between the Netherlands and Germany and to Austria in 2024. Together with Mars, Einride also plans to deploy 300 electric trucks across Europe by 2030.
“We have actually established over 30 customer agreements in seven countries over the last five to six years,” he said. “We have demonstrated our products and technology to many customers, and now it’s about pushing the throttle and expanding these relationships. To do that, we need to invest,” he added.
Driverless cargo trucking is expected to expand rapidly in the US
Automated freight trucking is expected to expand rapidly starting this year. Self-driving freight companies are flocking to Texas as a major deployment base, and not just because the state is known for being pro-business and lightly regulated. The Sunbelt has shipping routes from Texas to Arizona and California, and a large amount of cargo travels back and forth. The absence of severe weather conditions such as snow and ice removes one variable for self-driving technology to navigate.
But there’s also a lot of competition. Einride competes with self-driving truck companies such as: aurora innovation, Kodiak AIand fellow CNBC Disruptor 50 member Waabi.
Aurora Innovation, which acquired Uber’s self-driving technology group in 2020, operates self-driving freight routes between Dallas and Houston and recently launched a 1,000-mile route between Fort Worth and Phoenix, which is notoriously longer than a human truck driver can handle without stopping. Kodiak AI, whose operations connect Houston, Dallas and Oklahoma City, expects to deploy driverless, self-driving semiconductors on long-haul routes in the second half of this year. Aurora recently announced a deal with Volvo Autonomous Solutions to operate a new 200-mile freight route between Dallas and Oklahoma City.
Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary McLane plans to deploy Aurora Innovation’s self-driving trucking technology on routes in Texas and across the U.S. Sunbelt by the end of the year.
“Autonomous driving is happening in the United States, and competition will definitely come from the United States,” Charli said. “The more competition there is in the OEM market, the better for us,” he said, referring to truck manufacturers’ investments in self-driving technology. “The developments that happen on the OEM side benefit us,” he added.
In its latest U.S. market announcement, Einride said it is deploying 75 manual electric heavy-duty trucks to Amazon’s Relay Freight Network, an expansion of the freight EV startup’s U.S. presence and part of Amazon’s efforts to expand emissions-free electrification technology across its logistics network and beyond last-mile deliveries.
Einride trucks will support Amazon’s middle mile network as part of Amazon Relay. Amazon Relay is an Uber-like app for truck drivers that Amazon launched in 2017 that allows them to reserve and transport Amazon packages. Trucks operating in the middle mile move orders between Amazon’s fulfillment centers, sorting centers, aviation facilities, and last-mile delivery stations.
Einride EV is projected to be able to travel up to 3 million miles of electric transportation annually with zero tailpipe emissions. Einride will also support charging infrastructure across five locations. Einride’s proprietary optimization software, Saga AI, is also used to manage EV execution for some Amazon loads, including charging planning.
The SPAC market will boom in 2025, the third-biggest year after 2020 and 2021, with private deals in tech companies being the main focus, as measured by deal flow and revenue, according to data from Renaissance Capital. But recently, performance has been mixed, particularly in transportation technologies such as autonomous driving and electrification, which are the focus of SPAC mergers. Another trucking-focused SPAC deal between Plus.AI and Churchill Capital IX planned for this year was scrapped in April, with both companies citing “market conditions.”
Recent winners include electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft company Joby Aviation and EV battery technology company QuantumScape, but their stocks have come under pressure this year. There are also a number of losers, including EV trucking companies Nikola and Volta, as well as several EV companies focused on the consumer vehicle market, including VinFast, Faraday Future, Polestar, Lucid, and Canoe.
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