Autonomous yard operations for the modern distribution center.
The building is automated. The yard is still a radio and a whiteboard.
A WMS knows every tote. Outbound waves are scheduled to the minute.
A lead spotter works a radio. Trailers wait. The night shift turns over.
Trailer dwell is the hidden cost on every wave. The analog yard is now the constraint.
The geometry repeats. Learned autonomy holds here first.
A public street is open world. A yard is painted lines and the same fifty trailers.
Fences, docks, and a night shift. Snow and unmarked construction still fall back to a human.
Most buyers will not replace a working spotter truck. We attach to the fleet they already own.
VP of transportation owns dwell. The DC general manager owns the night shift. Both will take a paid pilot.
Yard OS first. Vehicles optional.
Yard graph
Live occupancy plus the door schedule. A tractor is sent only to a door that will be free.
On-vehicle stack
Two lidars, a camera, RTK, and a safety PLC that can cut motion without asking the compute stack.
Optional tractor
Electric yard tractor through a partner. We do not take inventory. We do not quote a vehicle margin as if it were ours.
Recognized revenue, GAAP.
Q1 2025 – Q2 2026. Pipeline is not in this chart. June is preliminary.
Fourteen contracted yards. Thirty-one live sites.
Worked-example names. Replace before a real raise.
Four options that are not an operating system.
| Yard OS | Driver-out today | Software without the vehicle | Union / hourly labor | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Acme OS first. Vehicles optional. |
Yes | Partial | Yes | Yes |
| Vehicle OEMs Sell a driverless tractor. |
— | Yes | — | Partial |
| WMS / YMS Door schedules. No motion. |
Partial | — | Yes | Yes |
| Robotaxi stacks The yard is a down-market demo. |
— | Yes | Partial | — |
Jordan Hale
Off-highway autonomy at Caterpillar. Then fulfillment software at Amazon Robotics. The bottleneck was never the arm. It was the yard.
- Shipped autonomy into unionized industrial sites.
- Sells to the VP of transportation, not a digital-tour buyer.
- Will not fund a vehicle company by accident.
Priya Raman
Perception for agricultural machines at John Deere. Robot learning at CMU. The yard is a closed world — that is where learned autonomy sticks.
41 people. Chicago, Pittsburgh, Dallas. Delivery owns go-live, not slides.
Series A. The plan lives in the use-of-funds memo.
This slide does not carry a raise amount. Every allocation needs a denominator, and that page is the only place that has one.
Top two accounts were 38% of H1 2026. The plan funds a second delivery pod.
We miss a quarter before we skip the joint safety review.
We will sell a partner tractor. We will not take inventory.