TRATON GROUP has agreed to commit up to $25 million in non-dilutive research and development funding to autonomous driving company PlusAI, expanding a partnership aimed at accelerating the commercialization of factory-built autonomous trucks in the United States and Europe.
The expanded collaboration builds on a 2024 agreement under which PlusAI’s SuperDrive system was selected as the on-highway autonomous driving platform for TRATON brands including Scania, MAN and International. TRATON said the additional funding will support deeper integration of SuperDrive across its truck platforms, safety validation and commercialization programmes in key freight markets.
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Under the proposed terms, which remain subject to a definitive agreement, TRATON will also gain board representation following PlusAI’s planned public listing via a business combination with Churchill Capital Corp IX. The structure includes milestone-based private warrants tied to initial deployment revenue, aligning incentives around commercial rollout.
Fleet trials are already underway in Texas along the I-35 corridor between Laredo and Dallas, involving one of North America’s largest logistics providers. The companies said they have also completed driverless safety validation tests using International trucks equipped with SuperDrive, demonstrating autonomous fallback procedures and emergency manoeuvres without a human driver in the cab.
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PlusAI said its SuperDrive system is built on a proprietary “Reasoning–Reflex” autonomy architecture that combines vision-language models with transformer-based end-to-end driving, supported by redundant safety layers. The platform has been trained on more than seven million miles of real-world driving data across the U.S., Europe and Asia, and uses simulation and synthetic data to accelerate edge-case learning. The system runs on the NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Hyperion platform for Level 4 development.
Looking ahead, TRATON and PlusAI said they plan to scale operations in Texas with additional trucks, routes and freight volumes, while preparing pre-production builds and factory process validation for driverless-capable vehicles. Additional fleet trials with other customers across diverse routes are also planned.
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The partners said they expect to provide further details on the expanded partnership and commercialization roadmap at PlusAI’s Investor Day scheduled for Jan. 28, 2026. Autonomous trucking is seen as a potential response to structural challenges in the freight market, including driver shortages, rising costs and demand for safer, more reliable logistics capacity.