Humble Robotics raised a $51 million Series A on Thursday to move its cabless, electric Humble Hauler into customer pilots on port drayage and warehouse runs. Obvious Ventures led the round, with participation from existing investors Eclipse and Energy Impact Partners.
The raise brings the San Francisco startup’s total funding to $75 million, about six months after it emerged from stealth with a $24 million seed round and a driverless truck built with no cab. It also funds a bet founder and CEO Eyal Cohen made after a decade on long-haul autonomy: that short, repeatable freight moves, such as port drayage and plant-to-warehouse shuttles, are a more controlled place to put driverless, electric trucks to work than the open highway.
The new money will pay for customer pilots, testing and validation, early manufacturing, and a broader family of vehicles built on Humble’s modular platform, the company said in its release. Humble told FreightWaves Today in September it plans to sell the haulers to third-party operators.
Humble is targeting regional routes under 250 miles, which it says make up 87% of U.S. truck tonnage. That figure comes from 2021 federal data: trucks moved nearly 12 billion tons of domestic freight that year, and 87% of it traveled less than 250 miles, according to a Department of Energy analysis. Shipments under 100 miles accounted for 44% on their own.
Humble says it is working with customers, partners, and regulators to prepare for commercial deployment.
“We’ve spent years proving that a truck can drive itself. The harder question is how to make autonomy something a freight operator can depend on every day,” Cohen said in the release.
Why Humble picked short runs
Cohen’s long-haul work focused on lanes such as Dallas to Houston and Dallas to El Paso, Texas, he said in an August interview with FreightWaves. Then he looked at short-haul freight, a large market that almost no one was trying to automate.
“Short moves are served very well by electrification. Long haul is tougher in electrification, right? You are trying to figure out a massive battery and a massive charging system,” Cohen said.
The company’s website lists four use cases for the Hauler: port drayage, plant-to-warehouse shuttles, rail yard moves, and short legs between a carrier’s own terminals. It lists a 200-mile maximum range and a 55 mph top speed.
The shorter distance also changes what happens when something goes wrong.
“There are challenges even with the technology working perfectly with sending a large robot a thousand miles away, right? With no margin for error. I mean it has to be very safe,” Cohen said. “And in shorter distances that’s just a more controlled situation. You could have a depot nearby. You can have engineers nearby.”
A hauler with no cab or hitch
A conventional drayage move uses a day cab tractor pulling a container on a chassis. A lot of autonomous trucking automates only the tractor, Cohen said. That leaves two problems: something has to make the connection, and the tractor’s sensors can’t see behind the trailer.
“Today, if you have a tractor and you want to hook a trailer to it, you have to somehow automate that connection, right? That is non-trivial and I think people have been working on that for a while,” Cohen said. “People are using robotic arms and other mechanisms to try to connect a trailer to a tractor. Very challenging, right?”
Cohen’s answer was to combine the two into one flat, skateboard-style platform. Its standard configuration carries 40-foot international and 53-foot domestic containers, and sensor pods with cameras, lidar, and radar give it a 360-degree view, according to the company’s site.
The design started from a question Cohen asked himself: what would a freight vehicle look like if the autonomy were perfect?
“If you had a quantum computer and this AGI brain, how would you think about moving freight? It would be just a platform, right, that you can land a container on,” he said.
Dropping the cab also drops weight. The website bills the Hauler as 20% lighter than a traditional tractor and trailer, and that freed-up weight is the economic pitch.
“The goal is to take more weight per move if we can to reduce the cost per mile as well,” Cohen said.
Investors return before customer pilots
Eclipse, which led Humble’s seed round, returned for the Series A.
“Modernizing freight requires rethinking the entire system, from the vehicle itself to the intelligence that powers it,” said Jiten Behl, partner at Eclipse.
For scale, Gatik, which already runs autonomous routes of up to 400 miles between distribution centers and stores, raised $200 million in a Series D in August after completing 85,000 fully driverless orders.
But challenges remain. The release names no customers. In August, Cohen said the company was “aiming for customer pilots over the next 12 months.” He also acknowledged that Humble is building electric trucks for a market that has been slow to buy them.
“The electric trucks famously have not really taken off in the United States, but they’re taking off elsewhere internationally,” Cohen said.
Cohen’s path from Otto to Humble
Cohen spent his first decade as an engineer electrifying “buses, tanks, cars, excavators,” then moved to Apple before joining Otto as one of its first engineers. He stayed through Otto’s acquisition by Uber, then worked at Pronto and spent three years at Waabi.
At Otto, he worked on the October 2016 run in which a self-driving truck hauled a load of Budweiser 120 miles down Interstate 25 in Colorado with no one in the driver’s seat, Overdrive noted.
“You could see how amazing the technology could be and you could also see how far away the technology was.” Cohen said.
Handling every case on unpredictable U.S. roads, from a flat tire to a pedestrian on the highway, meant engineers had to hand-code each scenario into the truck, he said. He called 2016 his “reverse aha moment.”
The large language models behind tools like ChatGPT gave him a second aha moment, this one about what the truck’s software could understand. “There is now technology that allows us to reason about the world without having to individually list every single use case out there and try to solve it,” Cohen said. “And that’s been a real change.”
With the new round, Cohen said in the release, Humble is “taking the next step toward safer, more reliable and less expensive operations at scale.”
Why it matters: Why it matters: Drayage fleets that shuttle containers between ports and nearby warehouses could add a driverless option to their equipment plans if Humble’s pilots show the lighter Hauler carries more weight per move. Cohen’s 12-month target for those pilots runs through August 2027.
