Autonomous vehicle hype is back, and Humble Robotics is bringing it to freights | Equity Podcast

The autonomous vehicle space is starting to feel like a repeat of the 2016 hype cycle. Travis Kalanick is back building a robotics company, and the talent wars and capital are heating up the same way they did the first time around. The money’s flowing back, and it’s the people who lived through that first wave who are building the next one. 

Humble Robotics founder and CEO Eyal Cohen is one of them. Cohen was at Otto when Uber came calling, later followed Anthony Levandowski to Pronto, and after two decades bouncing between deep tech bets in the Bay Area, his new company came out of stealth in April with $24 million to build a fully autonomous, cabless electric hauler for freight. 

Cohen joins Kirsten Korosec on this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast to talk about AV déjà vu and what he’s learned from 15 years of building startups across electrification, solar, and robotics.  

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.

Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:31 Eyal’s AV background and “2016 all over again”
02:02 Why hype cycles hit every new industry
07:28 Building Humble: the cabless freight platform idea
12:37 Why Humble couldn’t have worked 10 years ago
17:07 Ditching lidar for cameras and vision models
19:12 Talent wars and building the Humble team
22:41 Advice for founders: choose culture over compensation
26:03 Outro