Humble Robotics Raises 51 Million Dollars to Pilot a Cabless Electric Truck for Port and Rail Drayage
Humble Robotics, a San Francisco startup less than a year old, closed a $51 million Series A on November 5. Obvious Ventures led. Eclipse and Energy Impact Partners, which backed the company’s $24 million seed round six months ago, came back in. Total funding is now $75 million, and the company hasn’t moved a single load of paying freight yet.
What it is building is the Humble Hauler, an electric truck with no driver’s cab at all. Humble designs the vehicle and the self-driving software together as one system, which is the opposite of the usual path of retrofitting autonomy onto a diesel or electric tractor someone else built. Dropping the cab, the seats and the controls a human needs saves weight. The company says the Hauler is about 20% lighter than a conventional semi doing the same job.
Built for the short, boring routes
The first version carries shipping containers. Range tops out at about 200 miles and top speed at 55 mph. Those numbers would rule it out of long-haul work, and they’re meant to. The target is dock-to-dock drayage: ports to rail terminals, terminals to warehouses, warehouses to distribution centers.
That’s a large slice of trucking. Department of Energy figures put 87% of US truck freight by weight in 2021 on trips of under 250 miles. Those runs repeat the same roads every day, which is what an autonomous system wants. They also start and end at depots, where charging is simple to install. And they’re where driver shortages and turnover bite hardest, because drayage pays by the load and spends hours in terminal queues.
Founder and CEO Eyal Cohen worked on self-driving and electric vehicles at Apple, Uber and Waabi before starting Humble. The team draws on Tesla, Waymo and Cruise.
The timeline is short and the field is getting crowded
Cohen has said customer pilots start in the first quarter of 2027 and commercial operations in the third quarter. The new money pays for those pilots, more testing and early manufacturing. Humble says it’s working with regulators but hasn’t said which states or permits are involved, and that’s the open question. A truck with no cab can’t fall back on a safety driver, so every pilot has to be approved as driverless from the first mile.
Others are further along. Gatik raised $200 million in August for driverless box trucks. In Germany, Lidl put Einride’s cabless electric truck into daily service in September. Port and terminal operators now have several companies pitching the same idea, and the ones that win will be the ones running containers on public roads first.
The number to watch is the Q1 2027 pilot date. A cabless truck that slips past it starts to look like the many autonomous freight programs that were always one year from service.