The autonomous vehicle wave has its newest entrant.
Humble, a San Francisco-based startup, emerged from stealth today with a $24 million seed round and a fully electric autonomous freight vehicle called the Humble Hauler, Fortune learned exclusively. Eclipse led the round, with Energy Impact Partners also participating.
The Hauler has no cab (essentially a self-driving platform) and is designed for 40-foot and 53-foot shipping containers and runs dock-to-dock—unloading at the destination rather than dropping a trailer and leaving. This isn’t always the case: Fellow AV trucking company Aurora operates a hub-to-hub model that hands off to local human drivers at drop yards near city limits, while Kodiak’s commercial operations rely on fixed launch-and-landing zones with no autonomous last-mile delivery.
“Trucks were never designed to be autonomous,” Eyal Cohen, Humble’s CEO and founder, told Fortune. “Removing the cab allows us to rethink the whole vehicle for an autonomous future.”
Eliminating the cab opens up 360-degree sensor coverage across cameras, LiDAR, and radar, and frees payload capacity. The autonomy stack runs on vision-language-action models—a newer paradigm than rule-based systems.
Humble built its first prototype in roughly six months. Cohen’s background lends credibility to that timeline: He helped build Otto, the company that completed the first autonomous freight delivery by semi-truck in 2016, sold SparkAI to John Deere in 2023, and ran hardware at Waabi. His team spans Tesla, Waymo, Cruise, Apple, and Uber.
Jiten Behl, partner at Eclipse and a Humble board member, joined the firm in January 2024. He previously served as Chief Strategy Officer and Chief Growth Officer at Rivian, where he helped close Amazon’s order for 100,000 electric delivery vans—the largest EV delivery vehicle purchase on record—and led more than $10 billion in financing, including Rivian’s IPO.
He frames Humble’s pitch to logistics operators simply. “When you go to them and say there is a possibility of 30 to 50% more efficiency in your business, you’re obligated to take it to your management team,” Behl told Fortune.
The market they are chasing is hard to ignore. U.S. truck freight is a $906 billion industry. The autonomous freight segment sits at an estimated $575.7 million in 2026 and is projected to reach $3.25 billion by 2035. Federal tailwinds are arriving in parallel. The Self Drive Act of 2026 was formally introduced in February, proposing a unified federal framework for autonomous trucking. Cohen was in Washington last week meeting with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which has been engaged with Humble since early in its development.
Behl puts the capital requirements of scaling and developing the product, and deploying a pilot program for the Hauler, in perspective: “This is not going to take a billion dollars. It’s going to take an order of magnitude less than that.”
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The post Exclusive: Startup Humble debuts cabless autonomous truck targeting $900 billion U.S. freight industry appeared first on Fortune.
