Humble Robotics raises $24M from Eclipse to build autonomous cabless electric freight trucks

Humble Robotics raises $24M seed to build cabless electric freight trucks

Humble Robotics, an eight-month-old San Francisco startup, has raised a $24M seed round led by Eclipse Ventures, with EIP also participating. The company is building autonomous, cabless electric freight vehicles designed to move freight at a lower cost per mile than conventional semi-trucks.

“We raised $24,000,000. The lead investor was Eclipse. By removing the cab, you make the whole vehicle lighter and you make the vehicle less expensive. The target is we want the equipment to be comparable in price to what you see a tractor and a trailer today — and then the cost per mile is just dramatically lower. We started about eight months ago and we built this vehicle very quickly.”

The product logic

Removing the cab is not an aesthetic choice. Founder Eyal Cohen argues it is the cleanest path to the lowest cost per mile in freight. Autonomy saves roughly $1 per mile by eliminating the driver. Electric drivetrains cut maintenance costs and reduce fuel exposure. And stripping the cab makes the vehicle lighter and cheaper to manufacture. The target is a 40-foot combined tractor-trailer unit priced comparably to a conventional tractor and trailer combined, so the economics show up entirely in per-mile operating cost.

Cohen says camera-based vision has advanced enough that the company is building around it rather than LiDAR, despite most of his prior career being in LiDAR development. The commercialization path follows the standard autonomy playbook: private road testing first, then supervised pilots, before unsupervised commercial operation.

Customer integration is a live constraint

Cohen is candid that freight infrastructure creates real integration complexity. Loading dock compatibility, charging logistics, and plugging into diverse shipper software stacks all require early customer collaboration. Humble went public about its plans deliberately to start those conversations now, while the vehicle is still in development.

Cost and capital

Cohen acknowledges $24M is a starting point for a program that spans hardware, autonomy software, and vehicle manufacturing. His argument is that the cost to build in this space has dropped sharply as foundational autonomy work, much of it done by Waymo and others over the past decade, becomes available to build on. He has spent ten to eleven years working on autonomous freight across multiple startups and views that compounding work as a structural cost advantage for new entrants.

Manufacturing will scale outside San Francisco, with the location still to be determined, though Cohen frames the company explicitly as part of US reindustrialization. Design and prototyping are in San Francisco, where a 40-foot vehicle currently sits on the warehouse floor.