Humble Robotics founder credits his human network for his AV startup's success

Eyal Cohen got the news that VC firm Eclipse Capital had signed on to a seed funding round for his fledgling startup, Humble Robotics, while he was in Europe.

On the flight back to San Francisco, he thought about the talented people he’d crossed paths with during stints at startups and tech giants over the course of two decades in the Bay Area.

“I remember sitting on this plane ride, just writing out names of people I’ve loved from 20 years ago, 15 years ago, 10 years ago, and then I got home and I just got on the phone and started calling everybody,” Cohen, Humble’s founder and CEO, told Morning Brew.

His pitch to them was that it was a big project, one that could transform the trucking industry. Humble, which emerged from stealth in April with $24 million in seed funding, is developing a cab-less, autonomous, electric hauler for freight transportation. The seed round was led by Eclipse, with participation from Energy Impact Partners and others.

Within six months, Cohen brought on about 20 people with previous experience at companies like Uber, Waymo, and AV trucking startup Waabi. Humble’s Head of Autonomy, Drew Gray, for example, previously led Tesla’s Autopilot program and worked on autonomy at numerous companies, including Uber.

Cohen credits the team with keeping him motivated and joyful throughout long work days and big challenges.

“It really, really matters who you bring along for the journey,” he said.

IRL: One of the reasons Cohen believes he was able to convince former coworkers to join Humble was the appeal of tackling a big, ambitious problem that was squarely in the physical world.

“We got away from this era that I started my career in, of VC money going to very big projects, trying to do materially hard things, very big things,” Cohen said. “I think a lot of people responded to that.”

Humble isn’t a company that Cohen plans to spend a couple of years building to sell it; it’s a massive undertaking that will take many years of work to see through. And it’s getting started at a time of enthusiasm around the possibilities AI enables in the physical world.

“This is the first time in my career I’ve seen this much excitement around physical startups, in general,” Cohen said. “There’s times when physical things were deemed too hard, and not worthy of tackling or investment…But you see the most transformational projects are physical.”

From the ground up: Cohen’s resume seems purpose-built for the job: He was head of hardware engineering, system engineering, and operations at Waabi; co-founded and served as CTO for SparkAI, a human-in-the-loop AI tech company John Deere bought in 2023; and worked at Uber and Apple, among others.

“Humble, in a way, is the culmination of everything that I’ve done in my career,” he said. “It’s electrification and autonomous trucking, and understanding how those two play together.”

The startup’s team has taken a clean-sheet design approach to developing the Humble Hauler. Removing the cab, according to the company, makes for a lighter product and opens up “a breadth of new logistics use cases” in an industry valued at over $900 billion.

The first iteration of the Humble Hauler is designed to move shipping containers, but the startup says its universal platform can be adapted for numerous cargo types.

The vehicle is equipped with cameras, lidar, and radar sensors to perceive the environment around it. It uses “vision-language-action (VLA) models” to reason “and take the right action even in scenarios it’s never experienced,” according to a news release.

“Humble, for me, is pushing the frontier of autonomous tech,” Cohen said. “We’re building, for the first time, a purpose-built Class 8 truck. Meaning, it’s not just retrofitting an existing vehicle to be autonomous, but it’s actually redesigning the vehicle entirely from the ground up.”

This approach is what got the attention of partners at Eclipse, who wrote in a blog post that trucking is “one of the most ‘obvious’ use cases for autonomy,” but one that mostly hasn’t worked out yet.

“Humble’s decision to build a vertically integrated business based on a universal platform…isn’t an unnecessarily risky ‘flex,’” they wrote. “It’s a requirement if you want the economics to work.”

“For the past decade, we’ve seen countless robotics startups that have built amazing prototypes with intentions to solve a clearly defined problem, but they couldn’t get off the ground for one reason or another,” they added. “But now, there is a cohort of seasoned robotics operators and repeat founders like Eyal who are building new systems with autonomy at the core.”

For the short haul: Unlike other autonomous trucking companies like Waabi and Aurora, Humble is focused on local, short-haul routes in which the vehicle can deliver cargo directly to the dock.

“I spent a lot of time working on long-haul trucking, and I became aware during that time of all the small moves that happen in our space in America,” Cohen said. “There’s a ton of freight that moves less than 100 miles. Sometimes there’s freight moving one mile…My question was, who’s automating those links? Who’s trying to make those links robotic?”

In launching Humble, his goal was to move freight at the lowest dollar per mile possible and with the simplest possible vehicle.

The Humble team completed an initial prototype in under six months, and now is preparing for testing and commercialization pilots in partnership with prospective customers.

The startup will conduct testing on private roads and via simulations before moving on to supervised testing on public roads. Once it meets certain safety thresholds, it’ll test on public roads without supervision. The startup is looking at Texas and California as possible test sites.

The company’s seed funding “will support continued development of next-generation vehicles, expand its autonomy stack, launch initial pilot deployments, and enable early manufacturing as the company works toward initial deployment on public roads,” according to the release.

“We’ve taken on a hard challenge. It’s a big bet. It’s a big swing,” Cohen said. “But that’s very motivating for us.”