Chris Urmson

In November 2021, Aurora went public by merging with Reinvent Technology Partners Y, a Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC). The merger made Chris Urmson a billionaire, as Chris holds 145,831,739 shares of Aurora with a value of approximate $10 a share at the time of going public.

In December 2020, it was announced that Uber had invested $400 million dollars in Aurora, which would take over Uber's self-driving vehicle project. While Uber had initially attempted to develop self-driving taxis to replace drivers, Aurora will shift to developing a self-driving semi-truck.

As of December 2019, Urmson leads a company of almost 400 employees with offices in Palo Alto, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, and Bozeman, Montana. Urmson and Aurora are focused on creating a transportation ecosystem around the Aurora Driver by partnering with automakers, logistics services, mobility services, and fleet management providers. The Aurora Driver itself is composed of sensors that perceive the world, software that plans a safe path through it, and a computer that powers and integrates them both with the vehicle.

Chris Urmson is a Canadian engineer, academic, and entrepreneur known for his work on self-driving car technology. He cofounded Aurora Innovation, a company developing self-driving technology, in 2017 and serves as its CEO. Urmson was instrumental in pioneering and advancing the development of self-driving vehicles since the early 2000s.

In 2017, Urmson, along with Sterling Anderson, Tesla's former head of Autopilot, and Drew Bagnell, a founding member and head of Uber's autonomy and perception team, co-founded Aurora. Backed by Amazon and Sequoia, among others, the company is building the Aurora Driver, a platform that brings together software, hardware, and data services to fully operate any passenger or commercial vehicle.

After his victory in the DARPA Urban Challenge, Urmson was approached by Google to lead their self-driving car project. Urmson led Google's self-driving car project for nearly eight years. Under his leadership, Google vehicles accumulated 1.8 million miles of test driving. Urmson left Google in 2016.

Urmson served as the CTO of X, Google's self-driving car team, joining in 2009 and taking over from Sebastian Thrun as project lead in 2013. He was the main engineer who built the code running Google's autonomous software. Urmson left the company in 2016.

While earning his PhD in Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, Urmson's technical leadership was critical in the development of his team's robotic vehicles that participated in the DARPA Grand Challenges in 2004 and 2005 and the Urban Challenge in 2007. He was one of the original leaders of Google's self-driving car project, which later spun off into Waymo in 2016.

He also served as the technical director of the DARPA Urban and Grand Challenge teams. Urmson and the CMU Tartan "Red" Racing team developed a robotic vehicle called Sandstorm, a converted Humvee, which went the furthest distance in the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2004 (however, no winner was declared that year). With Sandstorm and H1ghlander, a modified Hummer H1, CMU placed second and third in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. In the DARPA Urban Challenge in 2007, his team developed a vehicle called Boss, a Chevy Tahoe, which won the competition.

Urmson earned his BSc in computer engineering from the University of Manitoba in 1998 and Ph.D. in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2005. His thesis was entitled "Navigation Regimes for Off-Road Autonomy".

Urmson was born in Canada in 1976, the son of emigrants from England. Urmson's father worked for the Correctional Service of Canada and eventually served as the warden of the Kent Institution. As a child, Urmson lived in Trenton, Ontario; Victoria, British Columbia; and Winnipeg before settling in Saskatoon.