Aurora Offers to Most Uber ATG Employees, Excluding R&D Lab

Aurora Innovation, a company developing autonomous vehicle technology, extended employment offers to over 75% of the staff at Uber Advanced Technologies Group (ATG) on Thursday. This action occurred just one week after the announcement of Aurora’s plans to acquire Uber’s self-driving technology division, as reported by an individual with knowledge of the integration process.

The Uber ATG location in Toronto, comprising approximately 50 employees involved in research and development, will not be included in the integration. Additionally, Raquel Urtasun, the chief scientist of Uber ATG and leader of its R&D team, was not offered a position. It had been previously established that Eric Meyhofer, the CEO of Uber ATG, would not be joining Aurora following the completion of the acquisition. Until recently, it remained uncertain whether Urtasun, a professor at the University of Toronto and a leading figure in machine learning and computer vision, as well as a co-founder of the Vector Institute for AI, would transition to Aurora. Urtasun is widely recognized as a prominent expert in machine perception for autonomous vehicles.

More than 850 of the 1,200 employees at Uber ATG received job offers via email from Chris Urmson, co-founder and CEO of Aurora. Urmson acknowledged in the email, a portion of which was reviewed by TechCrunch, that making these selections was a challenging process. He explained that the decisions were based on Aurora’s particular business requirements, including areas of overlap, potential impact, and reporting structures.

Aurora declined to provide comment regarding the offers but confirmed that the Toronto office of Uber would not be incorporated into the combined organization. A representative from Uber also verified that the Toronto R&D facility would not be integrated into the new entity.

“As a standalone company dedicated to long-term growth and success, we must carefully consider resource allocation and deployment. To achieve our objectives, we integrate research directly into our development and engineering processes, rather than maintaining a separate research and development division,” stated an Aurora spokesperson in an email. “We hold Raquel Urtasun and her team in high regard. Their contributions to both the ATG team and the broader industry have been significant. While they will not be continuing with Aurora, we extend our best wishes for their future endeavors.”

Should all Uber ATG employees who received offers accept them, Aurora’s workforce would more than double in size. Prior to the acquisition announcement, Aurora employed around 600 individuals across its offices in Palo Alto, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, and Texas. Uber ATG had operations in Pittsburgh, San Francisco, and Toronto.

Aurora and Uber engaged in several months of discussions before finalizing a complex agreement that establishes the combined company’s value at $10 billion. Aurora is not making a cash payment for Uber ATG, which had been valued at $7.25 billion after a $1 billion investment from Toyota, DENSO, and SoftBank’s Vision Fund. Instead, Uber will transfer its equity in ATG and invest $400 million into Aurora, resulting in a 26% ownership stake in the combined company, as detailed in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Existing shareholders in Uber ATG will now become minority shareholders in Aurora.

Upon the deal’s announcement, Urmson informed TechCrunch that the subsequent 60 days would be dedicated to integrating the two teams and “objectively evaluating the technology that will expedite our initial product launch and then maximizing its potential.”