Trucks VC counts 81 new autonomous vehicle startups in 2026, more than any year of the first AV boom

Trucks Venture Capital has seen 81 new autonomous vehicle startups so far in 2026, more than in any full year since it was founded in 2015 and ahead of the busiest years of the first AV boom, partner Puneeth Meruva wrote in an Oct. 29 post. That is two-thirds more than last year, TechCrunch reported on Nov. 1. Nearly all of the new companies build on foundation models applied to driving, the post says.

The models have made the first deployment cheap, and only that. Trucks regularly sees startups deploy within a few months on less than $1 million, Meruva told TechCrunch, and open models such as NVIDIA's Alpamayo and Qwen's vision-language-action models have made starting easier, the newsletter noted. His own post concedes that deploying vehicles nationally, with the uptime riders now expect from Waymo, "is still going to take large pockets." So most of this wave will sell autonomy on particular routes and in particular regions, which is where Meruva expects small companies to compete with Waymo.

Construction, warehouse, agriculture and mining were in the mix, but a growing number of the 81 pitched pure-play robotaxi businesses, many as direct Waymo competitors, TechCrunch reported. Trucks has tracked 582 pre-seed and seed autonomy startups over the past decade, across passenger vehicles, trucks, aviation and aerospace.

"Nobody believed a small startup in 2022 if the founders said they were going to take on Waymo and win," Meruva wrote. "In 2026, that's changed."