Humble Robotics raises $51 million to pilot its cabless electric autonomous hauler

Humble Robotics, a San Francisco startup building driverless electric freight vehicles without a cab, said on November 5 that it has raised $51 million in a Series A round. Obvious Ventures led the round, and existing investors Eclipse and Energy Impact Partners took part. Together with a $24 million seed round announced in April, when the company came out of stealth, Humble has now raised $75 million, according to FreightWaves.

A truck without a driver's seat

Most autonomous trucking companies add self-driving systems to a conventional tractor. Humble instead combines tractor and trailer into a single flat, skateboard-style vehicle, the Humble Hauler, designed from the outset to carry no one. The company lists a 200-mile range, a 55 mph top speed and an all-electric powertrain, and says the vehicle can carry both 40-foot international and 53-foot domestic containers. Sensor pods with cameras, lidar and radar provide 360-degree coverage, and Humble claims the platform is 20% lighter than a standard tractor-trailer combination.

The driving software, which Humble calls Humble Driver, is described by the company as a vision-first, end-to-end foundation model bounded by safety constraints and site-specific rules. Humble says it requires no prior mapping and can be adapted to a new logistics site in a few days, and that the model states its reasoning in plain language before acting.

Short hops first

Humble is targeting port drayage, shuttles between factories and warehouses, container moves in rail yards and short runs between a carrier's own terminals. It argues that routes under 250 miles account for 87% of US truck tonnage, a figure FreightWaves notes is drawn from 2021 federal data. Chief executive Eyal Cohen, who previously worked on autonomy at Otto, Pronto and Waabi, told the outlet that sending a large driverless vehicle over long distances leaves no margin for error, which is part of why he chose short runs.

What remains unproven

The company has not named any customers. Cohen said in August that Humble was aiming for pilots within roughly a year, and the new funding is meant for those pilots, testing and validation, early manufacturing and additional vehicle variants on the same modular base. Humble says it is working with regulators ahead of commercial deployment, but neither report cites specific permits. The company also faces established rivals: Gatik, which runs driverless routes between distribution centres and stores, raised a $200 million Series D in August.