Aurora Innovation

Chris Urmson is one of the founding figures of the modern self-driving industry. A Canadian engineer with a computer engineering degree from the University of Manitoba (1998) and a PhD in robotics from Carnegie Mellon (2005), he was a technical leader on CMU's robotic vehicles in the DARPA Grand Challenges of 2004 and 2005 and the winning Urban Challenge effort in 2007 — the contests that seeded the entire autonomous-vehicle field. He then became one of the original leaders of Google's self-driving car project, serving as CTO of the effort that later spun out as Waymo in 2016. In 2017 he co-founded Aurora Innovation with Sterling Anderson and Drew Bagnell to build the Aurora Driver, a platform-agnostic autonomy system the company ultimately focused on long-haul trucking. As CEO he steered Aurora through its acquisition of Uber's Advanced Technologies Group, its 2021 Nasdaq listing via SPAC merger with Reinvent Technology Partners Y, and the 2025 launch of commercial driverless trucking on Texas highways — the first service of its kind.

Sterling Anderson earned his doctorate at MIT, where his research on shared human-machine control of vehicles caught Chris Urmson's attention and earned him an invitation to speak at Google's self-driving car project in 2012. After a stint at McKinsey & Company, he joined Tesla, where he led the development and launch of the Model X and ran the company's semi-autonomous Autopilot program. In 2017 he co-founded Aurora with Urmson and Drew Bagnell, serving as Chief Product Officer and helping lead the company through the launch of the world's first commercial fully driverless trucking service. In May 2025 he announced his departure from Aurora — effective June 1, with his board seat relinquished that August — to become General Motors' first chief product officer, reportedly lured with a $40 million hiring package. At GM he oversees the end-to-end product lifecycle across gas and electric vehicles, and senior leaders have floated him as a potential successor to CEO Mary Barra.

Drew Bagnell is a machine-learning and robotics researcher who met Chris Urmson in 1999 when both were robotics graduate students at Carnegie Mellon University. He served as a professor at CMU from 2004 to 2018, where his work on imitation learning, reinforcement learning, and robot perception became foundational to how autonomous systems learn from human demonstration. From January 2015 to December 2016 he was Head of Perception and Autonomy Architect at Uber's Advanced Technologies Group, helping build the ride-hailing giant's first self-driving program. In 2017 Bagnell co-founded Aurora Innovation with Urmson and Sterling Anderson. As Chief Scientist he oversees the machine-learning core of the Aurora Driver as the company scales its commercial driverless trucking operations in Texas.