PlusAI and the TRATON GROUP said they are expanding their global partnership to accelerate the development and scaled deployment of on-highway autonomous trucking solutions in the United States and Europe, as PlusAI advances toward a public listing through its previously announced business combination with Churchill Capital Corp IX.
Under the expanded arrangement now being negotiated, TRATON would commit up to $25 million in dedicated, non-dilutive research and development funding to support deeper factory integration of PlusAI’s SuperDrive virtual driver system across trucks sold under TRATON brands, including Scania, MAN, and International. The companies also said TRATON will nominate a representative to PlusAI’s initial board following the planned listing, subject to customary approvals, and that TRATON would be eligible to receive private warrants that vest in tranches based on initial deployment revenue milestones.
The partnership builds on a collaboration first announced in 2024, when PlusAI’s SuperDrive was selected as the on-highway autonomous driving platform for TRATON’s brands. The companies said they have since achieved technical and operational milestones aimed at enabling Level 4 autonomous trucking, including autonomous fleet trials in Texas with a major logistics and transportation operator.
TRATON and PlusAI framed the effort as an OEM-led commercialization strategy designed to increase confidence in performance and safety validation while leveraging established sales and service networks. TRATON said it delivered 305,500 vehicles globally in 2025 and positioned autonomy as part of its long-term technology roadmap.
PlusAI, founded in 2016, described SuperDrive as an AI-native virtual driver stack that combines a vision-language model-based reasoning layer with an end-to-end transformer-based reflex layer, supported by rule-based guardrails and redundancy for safety-critical operations. The company said the system is trained on more than 7 million miles of real-world operations across the U.S., Europe, and Asia, with simulation and synthetic data used to accelerate edge-case learning.
The companies highlighted recent work across TRATON brands in 2025, including customer fleet trials along the I-35 corridor between Laredo and Dallas using next-generation tractors equipped with factory-installed sensors and compute, development work using the NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Hyperion platform, and driverless safety maneuver validation tests conducted without a driver in the cab and without remote intervention.
Looking ahead, TRATON and PlusAI said they plan to expand their Texas operations and report key performance indicators, including autonomous miles driven, safety performance, uptime, and cost per mile, as activity scales. They also said they intend to add more customer fleet trials and continue pre-production builds, factory process validation, and safety case development as they prepare for commercial launch. The companies expect to discuss the expanded partnership and commercialization roadmap in more detail at PlusAI’s Investor Day planned for January 28, 2026, with TRATON management expected to participate alongside PlusAI and Churchill leadership.
KEY QUOTES
“Autonomous trucking is a strategic pillar of TRATON’s long-term technology roadmap,” said Niklas Klingenberg, Member of the Executive Board, responsible for Research & Development in the TRATON GROUP. “From day one of our collaboration, PlusAI’s technical capabilities and commercial execution have exceeded our expectations, giving us even greater confidence that we have chosen the right partner. Autonomy represents a meaningful opportunity to deliver higher uptime and greater value for our fleet customers while strengthening the long-term competitiveness of our brands. Our expanded partnership will reflect both this confidence and our shared goal of bringing factory-built on-road autonomous trucks to market at scale.”
Niklas Klingenberg, Member of the Executive Board, Research & Development, TRATON GROUP
“Together with TRATON, we’ve moved autonomy from the lab to factory integration and now to real-world operations,” said David Liu, CEO and Co-Founder of PlusAI. “We now have a common Level 4 software stack operating in Europe and the U.S., proven integration on truck platforms of TRATON’s brands, successful driverless validation, and customer pilots underway. The expanded partnership allows us to build on this momentum and accelerate towards scaled commercial deployment.”
David Liu, CEO and Co-Founder, PlusAI
