Driverless vehicle technology has the potential to transform industries — and indeed, it already has. Stockholm, Sweden-based Einride has raised over $32 million for freight systems that transport logs, shipping containers, and other cargo autonomously. Meanwhile, Alphabet’s Waymo has deployed a commercial robo-taxi service in Phoenix, Arizona.

As for Outrider, previously Azevtec (Autonomous, Zero-Emission Vehicle Technologies), it hopes to do for yard trucks what Waymo did for ride-hailing and Einride did for trucking. The company, which is headquartered in Golden, Colorado, was founded in 2017 with the goal of automating vehicle movement in freight hubs to reduce costs while improving safety. Today it emerged from stealth with $53 million in seed funding led by NEA and series A funding led by 8VC…

But Outrider is betting its holistic solution — and its team of over 75 employees, 50 of which are engineers hailing from Nvidia, Tesla, iRobot, Lockheed Martin, GM’s Cruise Automation, the U.S. Armed Forces, Carnegie Mellon, Georgia Tech, Purdue, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, and Northwestern — will set it apart from the pack.
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