A New Wave of Autonomous Transportation: 81 Startups, Big Rounds and Deals of the Week

The autonomous startup boom has surpassed the figures of a decade ago

According to Trucks VC, an early-stage fund, 2026 has turned out to be even hotter than the noisy years of 2016–2017: since the beginning of the year, the fund has received pitches from 81 new autonomous transportation startups — two-thirds more than a year earlier. The fund's blog states that the industry is experiencing a second, larger wave of the AV boom, driven by breakthroughs in AI. Fund partner Punit Meruva attributes this to the emergence of foundation models that make possible the industry's 'holy grail' — an end-to-end architecture for self-driving vehicles — while open models such as Nvidia Alpamayo and Qwen's vision-language-action models have lowered the barrier to entry: startups, he says, are reaching the market within a few months and with less than $1 million raised. A surprise for the newsletter's author was that among the pitchers there are increasingly pure robotaxi companies positioning themselves as direct competitors to Waymo; Meruva believes that niche players can compete in individual regions and routes rather than on a global scale.

Big rounds and consolidation in delivery

The week brought several major deals. Re:Build — a manufacturing accelerator from Massachusetts, co-founded by former Amazon commercial chief Jeff Wilke and calling itself 'America's answer to Shenzhen' — raised $2.1 billion led by General Catalyst and JPMorganChase's Strategic Investment Group to expand the production of 'hard' technologies and launch industrial startups. Re:Build is known as the company from which Slate Auto was spun out, whose secret backing by Jeff Bezos TechCrunch wrote about back in April 2025. The autonomous technology startup Bedrock Robotics raised $600 million in a Series C round at a $4.1 billion valuation: the round was co-led by CapitalG and Emergence Capital, with participants including Nvidia, Temasek, Bessemer Venture Partners and 8VC. DoorDash has agreed to acquire Instacart for $17 billion; meanwhile, in its third-quarter report the company noted that it has so far received only a few hundred orders from AI agents. Another round: San Francisco-based PreScalar, which develops software and testing infrastructure for factories, raised $7 million at the seed stage with co-investment from Dynamo Ventures and BMW i Ventures; the company was founded last year by a trio of alumni from Cruise, Google, Rivian and Waymo.

Self-driving trucks, robotaxis and electric vehicles

Kodiak AI has signed its first binding commercial contract for the supply of 75 self-driving trucks to freight company DTL Transport starting in 2028 — the company's first deal for driverless big rigs that will operate on public roads. Waymo and Toyota have moved their partnership from talks to production: Toyota will produce autonomy-ready bZ4X crossovers with an integrated Waymo system at its plant in Japan — the vehicles are intended for robotaxis in Japan, the UK and other international markets, and the companies hinted that this could lead to licensing Waymo's technology for personal cars. Tesla has turned to the car rental platform Turoto boost adoption of its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) system. Rivian, after the third quarter, raised the lower end of its 2026 delivery forecast from 65,000 to 67,000 electric vehicles thanks to the success of the R2 crossover, and its $5.8 billion joint venture with Volkswagen Group is expanding into AI assistants — whether VW is investing additional funds has not yet been reported.

GM, Ford and other news

GM, which previously criticized hybrids, is now developing that direction; at the same time, the automaker has closed the incident over the sale of driver data, agreeing to a $220 million payment in a settlement with 36 states (agreements with California and the FTC were reached earlier) over accusations of illegally selling driving and location data to data brokers. Ford unveiled two new chargersthat will allow the future Fathom pickup to work as a battery, sending energy to a home or the grid; according to TechCrunch, Fathom will be the cheapest American EV with this feature. Elroy Air, which is developing autonomous heavy cargo drones for defense, rapid response, and commercial logistics, has hired Jeremy Hux as chief financial officer as part of preparations for going public. Separately, TechCrunch announced a one-day Founder Summit in Boston on November 4 for founders and investors, with a 30% discount using the promo code mobility30.