Humble Robotics raises $51 million to put its cabless electric hauler into customer pilots

Humble Robotics, a San Francisco startup building a driverless, cabless electric freight hauler, has raised a $51 million Series A led by Obvious Ventures, with existing investors Eclipse and Energy Impact Partners taking part, it said on Nov. 5. Its total is now $75 million less than a year after it was founded, and six months after it came out of stealth with a $24 million seed round.

The money buys more than software. It will pay for customer pilots, testing, early manufacturing and a wider family of vehicles on the same modular platform, and it told FreightWaves it plans to sell the haulers to third-party operators. That makes it a vehicle maker, with a vehicle maker's build and approval timeline, where Kodiak licenses its driving system for trucks built by others. Humble has not yet moved freight commercially. In August, founder Eyal Cohen, who worked on autonomy at Apple, Uber and Waabi, said he was aiming for customer pilots within 12 months.

The Humble Hauler is a flat Class 8 platform that carries 40-foot and 53-foot containers between ports, rail yards and warehouses. Humble lists a 200-mile maximum range, a 55 mph top speed and a weight 20% below a standard tractor and trailer, FreightWaves reported. It is aimed at routes under 250 miles, which the company says carry 87% of US truck tonnage, so the listed range covers only part of that bracket on one charge. Gatik, which raised $200 million in August, already runs autonomous box-truck routes of up to 400 miles.