Humble Robotics banks $51M Series A to put cabless trucks into drayage pilots

Humble Robotics raised a $51 million Series A on Thursday to push its cabless, electric Humble Hauler into customer pilots on port drayage and warehouse runs — bringing total funding to $75 million and raising a question the release does not answer: who, exactly, will run the trucks.

Obvious Ventures led the round. Eclipse, which led the seed, returned alongside Energy Impact Partners. Six months ago the San Francisco startup emerged from stealth with a $24 million seed and a driverless truck built with no cab at all.

The money will fund customer pilots, testing and validation, early manufacturing, and a broader vehicle family on Humble's modular platform. The company told FreightWaves Today in September it plans to sell the haulers to third-party operators, not run a fleet itself. Commercial consequences for drayage fleets are straightforward in principle: a driverless option that carries more weight per move could cut cost per mile. In practice, the release names no customers, and founder and CEO Eyal Cohen said in August the company was "aiming for customer pilots over the next 12 months."

Why short runs?

Cohen spent a decade in long-haul autonomy, on lanes like Dallas–Houston and Dallas–El Paso, before concluding that short, repeatable freight moves are the better place to start. His target market is regional routes under 250 miles. He says those make up 87% of U.S. truck tonnage — a figure that checks out against a 2021 Department of Energy analysis of federal data: trucks moved nearly 12 billion tons of domestic freight that year, 87% of it traveling less than 250 miles, with shipments under 100 miles accounting for 44% on their own.

"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. Shorter distances also shrink the failure envelope: "You could have a depot nearby. You can have engineers nearby."

The company lists four use cases — port drayage, plant-to-warehouse shuttles, rail yard moves, and short inter-terminal legs — with a 200-mile maximum range and 55 mph top speed.

No cab, no hitch, no coupling problem

Most autonomous trucking efforts automate only the tractor. That leaves two unresolved problems, Cohen argues: something must automate the fifth-wheel connection, and the tractor's sensors cannot see behind the trailer. "People are using robotic arms and other mechanisms to try to connect a trailer to a tractor. Very challenging, right?"

His answer was to merge tractor and trailer into one flat, skateboard-style platform carrying 40-foot international and 53-foot domestic containers, with camera, lidar and radar pods giving a 360-degree view. The design began with a question: what would a freight vehicle look like if autonomy were perfect? "It would be just a platform, right, that you can land a container on," he said.

Dropping the cab drops weight. Humble bills the Hauler as 20% lighter than a conventional tractor-trailer, and that margin 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 — a claim that only pilot data will test.

What investors are underwriting

"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 runs autonomous routes 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. Humble, by contrast, has announced no commercial operations at all.

Cohen is candid about the market he is entering. "The electric trucks famously have not really taken off in the United States, but they're taking off elsewhere internationally," he said.

His path runs from electrifying "buses, tanks, cars, excavators," through Apple, then Otto as one of its first engineers — including the October 2016 run in which a self-driving truck hauled Budweiser 120 miles down Interstate 25 in Colorado with nobody in the driver's seat — then Uber, Pronto and three years at Waabi. He calls 2016 his "reverse aha moment": hand-coding every scenario, from flat tires to highway pedestrians, showed "how amazing the technology could be and how far away the technology was."

Large language models supplied the second aha. "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 says Humble is "taking the next step toward safer, more reliable and less expensive operations at scale." Whether that step lands depends on pilots that, on the company's own timeline, must show working cabless trucks in customer drayage service by August 2027.