Another Pittsburgh tech company has stated that it won't be issuing layoffs anytime soon despite workforce reduction efforts seen at many other tech industry peers over the better part of the past year.
Executives at Strip District-based Aurora Innovation Inc., makers of autonomous vehicle (AV) technology, announced during the company's Q4 2022 earnings call on Wednesday that they don't foresee any reason to reduce headcount in the coming months as the firm remains bullish on shipping its self-driving trucking product — Aurora Horizon — by the end of 2024. But it's a decision that comes as the company continues to burn through hundreds of millions of dollars per quarter as it pursues the shipment of its first commercial product by the end of 2024.
About half of Aurora's (NASDAQ: AUR) 1,600-person workforce reports to its Pittsburgh offices, though the company also has a significant presence in the Bay Area of California and in several cities throughout Texas, among other sites across the country.
Aurora joins East Liberty-based edtech platform maker Duolingo Inc., which has most of its 550-person workforce in Pittsburgh, as the latest local public tech company to explicitly mention during an earnings call that layoffs are not on the table.
But Aurora isn't looking to take on many more workers, either, at least not at this time.
CEO and Co-Founder Chris Urmson said that the company revamped its employee recruitment plans in early 2022 to account for the then-just-starting economic downturn that's primarily impacted tech companies of all sizes. He said those efforts have "served us well" over the past year.
"It's allowed us to limit our headcount growth and we continue to expect modest headcount growth over the coming year, which is of course lower than what we would have anticipated again at this time last year," Urmson said during the call. "With this very early and proactive approach to this, along with our measures even before that in 2021, it means that our headcount over that time period has grown substantially slower than tech broadly and certainly [compared to] our AV competitors."
Added Richard Tame, chief financial officer at Aurora: "We believe we're appropriately staffed now to continue to make progress against the Aurora Horizon roadmap and to get to commercialization. I think you'll see us continue to add headcount very strategically where it's necessary."
The company maintained that it has enough cash on-hand to get it to mid-2024 following the capital it raised from its November 2021 IPO, a position it has held since its last earnings call, which is when it also announced a pushback to the anticipated deployment date for Aurora Horizon.
Aurora posted a $293 million net loss during its most recent quarter and ended its fiscal year with a net loss of $1.7 billion. Its total assets, which include $262 million in cash and cash equivalents as well as $839 million in short-term investments, among other figures, stand at just over $2 billion.
"We’re confident in our runway and have the funding to get us into mid-2024, the year we intend to start our driverless commercial operations," an Aurora spokesperson said in an email statement when asked how the company plans to fund the gap between the exhaustion of its cash reserves and its commercial deployment timeline. "We expect our ability to execute against our roadmap to support our ability to strategically and opportunistically tap the capital markets in the future."
