PITTSBURGH (TNS) — Aurora — the Strip District-based autonomous trucking startup that is pioneering self-driving truck service on U.S. public roads — has entered a partnership with McLeod Software to expand its customer base.

McLeod (pronounced “McCloud”) provides software called Transportation Management System, or TMS, to its more than 1,200 trucking clients. Integrating its system with Aurora should help Aurora reach more partners and make it a part of a larger trucking ecosystem.

The partnership is a first for the autonomous trucking industry, officials said Thursday morning in a statement.

“By meeting customers where they are within their existing TMS, we’re making it easy for them to tap into the safety and efficiency benefits of autonomous trucks,” said Ossa Fisher, Aurora’s president.

In the world of moving goods, carriers are entities who have the trucks to transport goods. Some carriers, such as FedEx or Walmart, have their own trucks and TMS software specific to their company. Shippers, on the other hand, such as Pepsi or Coca-Cola, need to transport their products via carriers.

Similar to how a customer can track an Amazon package’s delivery route, TMS software gives carriers a platform to handle all things scheduling, dispatching and billing — all the “unsexy” parts of autonomous trucking, an Aurora spokesperson said Thursday.

“We’re trying to make the management of autonomous trucks feel so similar and look so similar to how carriers manage human-operated assets today,” the spokesperson said.

If a shipper isn’t also its own carrier, the shipper puts out a “load tender” — essentially a request for a carrier to move freight, and to see who is available and at what price. It’s almost like a bidding process, the Aurora spokesperson said.

McLeod, based in Birmingham, Ala., offers and facilitates that load-tending service. Aurora has its own app, but for carrier customers who might already use McLeod, this partnership offers a seamless connection between the two TMS services, officials said.

“Aurora will also be able to tap into McLeod’s deep roster of customers, further accelerating industry adoption of self-driving trucks,” according to the Thursday announcement.

Aurora, worth about $11 billion, has also recently unlocked nighttime driving on highways between Dallas and Houston. That means the trucks can officially operate, driverless, around the clock when human drivers would be required to take breaks.

Using a mix of cameras, radars and laser radars called Lidar, the Aurora truck “sees” 450 meters, or more than four football fields, into the distance in front of it. That supervision gives the driverless truck 11 seconds longer than a human driver to respond to a potential hazard down the road, one that a human wouldn’t even be able to see until they were much closer.

According to the company’s last earnings call in late July, the next step is to perfect and deploy trucks in inclement weather by the end of the year.

“And at that point, we expect the Aurora Driver will be capable of handling almost all observed weather conditions in the Sunbelt,” Chris Urmson, co-founder and CEO of Aurora, said on the earnings call.

Since launching commercially on highways between Dallas and Houston in April, Urmson said the Aurora driver “already locked more than 20,000 safe driverless miles” by the end of June. A YouTube livestream called Aurora Driver Live allows anyone to watch the autonomous truck’s 200-mile journey between the two Texas cities.

The company is also expanding its routes, adding a terminal in Phoenix, Ariz., in June, and is working on finalizing the Texas route between Fort Worth and El Paso, eventually roping in Phoenix by the end of the year.