Self-driving tech firm Aurora hires its first president

Self-driving technology firm Aurora Innovation Inc. appointed Ossa Fisher as its first president.

The move comes as part of the company’s efforts to prepare for a commercial launch of autonomous trucks.

Fisher joins Aurora from Istation, an education-technology company based in Dallas. She oversaw engineering, product, sales and marketing divisions in her role as Istation’s president and COO, a position she held since 2019.

At Aurora, Fisher will play a central role in scaling operations and maintaining relationships with key partners like FedEx Corp., Uber Freight, Werner, as well as truckmakers such as PACCAR and AB Volvo.

She will stay in Dallas, the company’s growing operational hub. Aurora had less than 20 employees in Dallas at the end of 2020; that number rose to nearly 120 by the end of 2022, according to a company spokesman.

That’s a small fraction of the company’s overall 1,600 employees, currently spread out over the country in Mountain View, Calif., Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Seattle, Bozeman, Detroit and Colorado.

Aurora intends to commercially launch self-driving trucks without human safety drivers aboard in 2024.

While the company has not said specifically which route will be used for the inaugural operations, it currently hauls goods while testing on routes that connect a terminal in the Dallas suburb of Palmer with Houston, and along separate route that links Fort Worth and El Paso.

Born in Sweden, Fisher moved to the U.S. in 1981 at the age of four. Before Istation, she held positions at Goldman Sachs and consulting firm Bain & Co.