Shares in self-driving truck company TuSimple Holdings Inc. were flat in their stock market debut today after the company raised $1.35 billion in its initial public offering on a valuation of $8.5 billion.

The company offered 33.8 million shares of its Class A common stock at $40 each and that’s the exact price at which the shares closed regular trading. The stock fell almost 4% after-hours trading.

Founded in 2015 with operations in Beijing, San Diego and Tucson, Arizona, TuSimple is developing artificial intelligence and computer vision technology for self-driving trucks. The company has a number of partners, including Navistar International Corp. and Volkswagen subsidiary Traton SE, both of which make commercial and heavy trucks, according to Investors.com.

TuSimple reported negligible revenue of $1.84 million last year, up from $710,000 in the previous year. The company is bleeding money, however, reporting a net loss of $177.87 million in 2020, up from $84.883 million in 2019.

TuSimple has been seen as one of the leading companies in the self-driving truck space having run a pilot program to ship freight with the U.S. Postal Service in May 2019. In a vote of confidence, United Parcel Service Inc. purchased a minority stake in the company for August 2019 in a deal that valued TuSimple at $1.1 billion. The company says it plans to produce autonomous trucks for the U.S. market by 2024.

The company has not been without issues. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States is investigating an investment by Chinese company Sun Dream Inc., an affiliate of Chinese technology firm Sina Corp., the owners of microblogging service Sina Weibo.

The concern from the committee is that the investment may pose a threat to U.S. national security. If found to be the case, Sun Dream would be required to divest its shareholding.

Despite the flat debut on public markets, TuSimple Chief Executive Officer and President Cheng Lu spoke up the listing, telling Yahoo Finance that the float was a huge milestone for the company, making it the first and only autonomous driving company to be publicly listed.

On the company’s significant net loss, Lu noted that “we are still in the development phase of our technology and our go-to-market strategy.”

“I think investors understand that this is a long development cycle,” Lu explained. “This does include quite a significant amount of investment, not only on the software side (but) the hardware side and the go-to-market side.”

Photo: TuSimple