The San Francisco startup, established by a former Uber ATG and Waabi engineer, is adopting a unique strategy for autonomous freight, distinct from Aurora or Kodiak: no driver’s cab, no hub handoffs, and an autonomy stack rooted in vision-language-action models instead of rule-based systems.
Humble, a San Francisco-based autonomous freight startup, has emerged from stealth with a $24 million seed round and an all-electric, cabless freight vehicle named the Humble Hauler.
Eclipse, the Palo Alto-based venture firm focused on physical AI, led the round, with participation from Energy Impact Partners.
Founded by Eyal Cohen, whose two-decade journey in autonomous vehicles includes experience at Apple, Uber ATG, Waabi, and Spark AI— a startup he co-founded that John Deere acquired in 2023.
The Hauler omits a traditional feature: a driver’s cab. Cohen explained to Fortune, which exclusively reported the launch, that standard trucks were not designed with autonomy in mind; their design reflects a world centering around human operators.
Eliminating the cab allows for 360-degree sensor coverage using cameras, LiDAR, and radar, increases payload capacity, and facilitates a fundamentally different vehicle design.
The Hauler accommodates 40-foot and 53-foot shipping containers, the standard measurements for intermodal freight, and performs dock-to-dock operations, delivering directly to the destination and unloading instead of dropping a trailer at a handoff point.
This dock-to-dock method marks a significant departure from the typical autonomous trucking market.
Aurora operates a hub-to-hub model with its driverless truck network spanning the Sun Belt, where autonomous trucks hand off to human drivers at drop yards near city limits. Kodiak operates using fixed launch-and-landing zones.
Both models simplify the autonomy challenge by limiting the operating domain. Humble’s strategy is that providing complete delivery to the customer is ultimately what logistics operators require, and that the Hauler’s design, partnered with an autonomy stack based on vision-language-action models, can achieve this faster than methods restricted by cab-forward truck configurations.
Jiten Behl, a partner at Eclipse, who joined the firm after his tenure as chief strategy officer and chief growth officer at Rivian, where he secured Amazon’s order for 100,000 electric delivery vans and led over $10 billion in funding including Rivian’s IPO, is directly linked to the Humble concept.
Behl conveys the commercial argument in terms difficult for logistics operators to dismiss: “When you suggest a potential 30 to 50% efficiency improvement, management must take notice.”
Regarding capital needed for scaling, Behl is notably conservative for a field that has absorbed billions: “This will not require a billion dollars. It will need an order of magnitude less than that.”
The market dynamics support both ambition and caution. US truck freight is a $906 billion industry. The autonomous freight sector is predicted to be $575.7 million in 2026 and to reach $3.25 billion by 2035.
Federal support is also on the horizon: the Self Drive Act of 2026, introduced in February, proposes a nationwide framework for autonomous trucking, and Cohen recently met with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in Washington. Humble has been engaged with NHTSA since its inception.
Humble has yet to disclose its commercial schedule, specific pilot partners, or target geographies for launching operations. The seed funding will support the Hauler’s development and the launch of a pilot program.
Whether it can leverage architectural distinctiveness and a skilled founding team into operational success before the opportunity passes, Aurora is already reporting over 250,000 driverless miles with zero at-fault collisions, with plans for 200 autonomous trucks by year-end, remains the question the $24 million aims to address.