San Francisco Startup Humble Raises $24 Million for Autonomous Freight Vehicle

Humble, a San Francisco-based startup, emerged from stealth on April 21, 2026, with a $24 million seed funding round and a fully electric autonomous freight vehicle called the Humble Hauler, as reported by @FortuneMagazine. The funding round was led by Eclipse, with Energy Impact Partners also participating.

The Humble Hauler has no cab and is designed to transport 40-foot and 53-foot shipping containers in dock-to-dock operations, unloading at the destination.

This design differs from models used by other companies, such as Aurora's hub-to-hub approach that involves handoffs to human drivers near city limits, and Kodiak's operations that rely on fixed zones without autonomous last-mile delivery. Eyal Cohen, Humble's CEO and founder, stated that trucks were not originally designed for autonomy and that removing the cab allows for rethinking the vehicle.

The design provides 360-degree sensor coverage using cameras, LiDAR, and radar, and increases payload capacity. The vehicle's autonomy stack uses vision-language-action models. Humble built its first prototype in about six months.

Cohen previously helped build Otto, which completed the first autonomous freight delivery by semi-truck in 2016, sold SparkAI to John Deere in 2023, and ran hardware at Waabi. The team includes members from Tesla, Waymo, Cruise, Apple, and Uber. Jiten Behl, a partner at Eclipse and Humble board member, joined Eclipse in January 2024.

He previously served as chief strategy officer and chief growth officer at Rivian, where he helped secure Amazon's order for 100,000 electric delivery vans and led over $10 billion in financing, including Rivian's initial public offering. Behl stated that the vehicle could offer 30 to 50% more efficiency for logistics operators.

The U.S. truck freight industry is valued at $906 billion, with the autonomous freight segment estimated at $575.7 million in 2026 and projected to reach $3.25 billion by 2035.

The Self Drive Act of 2026 was introduced in February, proposing a unified federal framework for autonomous trucking. Cohen met with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration last week, which has been engaged with Humble since early development. Behl noted that scaling the product and deploying a pilot program would require capital on an order of magnitude less than a billion dollars.