INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Embark Trucks has raised $30 million in a Series B funding round led by Sequoia Capital in its bid to be the first to develop and launch a
commercially viable driverless truck.
Sequoia partner Pat Grady has joined Embark board.Existing investors including Data Collective,
YCombinator, SV Angel and AME Cloud also participated in the round, Embark announced Thursday.
Embark, which was founded in 2016, has raised
$47 million to date.
The autonomous trucking field is starting to become crowded
A number of companies, and more it seems every day, are all developing and testing autonomous trucks, including TuSimple, Starsky Robotics,
Anthony Levandowski new company Kache.ai,Waymo, and Uber.
Each competitor in this emerging industry has a slightly different approach with
the same general aim.
Embark, for instance, doesn&t want to replace the driver completely
The company, whichemerged publicly in February 2017,envisions local drivers on the two tail ends of a long haul journey
A local driver would handle the piece from a warehouse to the interstate
From there, the driver would drop its freight and Embark self-driving system takes over, with a completely autonomous stint on the freeway
A local driver at the end of the trip would the freight to its final drop off point.
The company believes its tech, once deployed, will help
decrease the number of drivers needed for long-haul trips.
Despite its relatively small size—there are just 35 employees—Embark has
made considerable headway.
Embark has now added operations in Los Angeles suburb Ontario, according to co-founder and CEO Alex Rodrigues who
published Thursday a post on Medium on its new funding
The added operations places Embark in the middle of the West Coast biggest freight hubs, Rodrigues wrote, adding that the company&spresence
in the region was the key to hitting its milestones for the first half of 2018.
Embark is now running a daily service on its freight route
from Los Angeles to Phoenix and now
&As of June, our system can complete the route end-to-end with no disengagements,& Rodrigues wrote
&This includes lane changes, merges, on-ramps, off-ramps and lots of LA-metro traffic.&
In February, Embark completed a 2,400-mile drive
from Los Angeles to Jacksonville, Florida
The drive, which included a safety driver on board behind the wheel, took five days because of schedule rest brakes
Embasrk contends that the same trip would take only two days once its tech is cleared to run on its own.
