Autonomous truck company Embark begins trading on Nasdaq

Autonomous truck company Embark Trucks, Inc. completed its merger with Northern Genesis Acquisition Corp. II this week and began trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange under the ticker symbol EMBK. The company is valued at approximately $5 billion.

Embark builds the software that powers autonomous trucks and will license it to users on a per-mile basis. To date, the company says it has more than 14,200 reservations for the self-driving technology, including from logistics companies such as Knight-Swift, Mesilla Valley Transportation, and DHL.

The announcement makes history in that 26-year old Co-Founder and CEO Alex Rodrigues is now the youngest CEO of a publicly held company. Rodrigues founded Embark in 2016 with business partner and Chief Technology Officer Brandon Moak. They say the capital raised in the transaction will help the company bring self-driving trucks to market in the next few years.

“We are thrilled to reach this important milestone and become a public company to further our mission of evolving the trucking industry, and using autonomous software to create a safer, more efficient, and more sustainable freight ecosystem,” Rodrigues said in a press statement Thursday. “... We remain differentiated as America’s longest running self-driving truck program with an asset-light go-to-market strategy, our proprietary patent-pending Vision Map Fusion technology, and our carrier-friendly, platform-agnostic Embark Universal Interface approach. We believe that the capital raised in this transaction will help us achieve our commercialization plans to bring self-driving trucks to the U.S. Sunbelt in 2024.”