Key facts
- Trucks VC received pitches from 81 new autonomous vehicle startups in 2026, two-thirds more than the prior year, per the firm.
- Partner Puneeth Meruva said foundation models make end-to-end autonomous driving architectures possible.
- Meruva said startups are deploying within a few months and with less than $1 million raised.
Venture capital firm Trucks VC has fielded pitches from 81 new autonomous vehicle startups in 2026, two-thirds more than in the prior year and more than in the 2016 and 2017 boom, according to a TechCrunch Mobility newsletter that did not date the event. The firm made the argument in a blog post, and partner Puneeth Meruva told the newsletter that foundation models now provide a technical architecture that makes end-to-end autonomous driving systems possible.
Meruva said open source models including Nvidia's Alpamayo and Qwen's general-purpose vision-language-action models have lowered the barrier to entry, with startups deploying within a few months and with less than $1 million raised. He said a growing share of the pitching startups are pure-play robotaxi businesses positioning themselves as competitors to Waymo, and that smaller, more niche autonomy companies can compete in specific regions or route types.
The newsletter also reported other items not covered here, including a $2.1 billion raise by manufacturing accelerator Re:Build, a $600 million Series C for Bedrock Robotics at a $4.1 billion valuation, DoorDash's agreement to acquire Instacart for $17 billion, and a manufacturing partnership between Waymo and Toyota.