Chris Urmson.

Chris Urmson is the Co-Founder and CEO of Aurora Innovation, the publicly traded autonomous vehicle company focused on commercial trucking.

Urmson is widely regarded as one of the founding fathers of the self-driving car industry. Before Aurora, he led Google's self-driving car project (now Waymo) as CTO from 2009 to 2016, overseeing the team that drove the first autonomous vehicles on public roads. He co-founded Aurora in 2017 with Sterling Anderson (formerly of Tesla Autopilot) and Drew Bagnell (formerly of Uber ATG), bringing together veterans from the three most advanced self-driving programs in the world. Aurora went public via SPAC in 2021 and is developing Aurora Horizon, an autonomous trucking platform partnered with major fleets including PACCAR, Volvo Trucks, and Uber Freight. Urmson holds a PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University, where he was a lead engineer on the team that won the DARPA Urban Challenge in 2007. His two-decade commitment to autonomous vehicle development, through both academic research and commercial leadership, makes him one of the most consequential figures in American transportation technology.