Everyone thought the self-driving gold rush peaked a decade ago. It just got beaten. According to Trucks VC partner Puneeth Meruva, his firm alone has fielded pitches from 81 new autonomous-vehicle startups so far in 2026 — two-thirds more than last year, and more than the famous 2016–17 boom. A second, bigger wave — call it AV 2.0 — is under way, and this time it runs on AI foundation models.
What changed: the price of starting
The first AV wave needed billions and a decade. The new wave needs a laptop and an open model. End-to-end architectures built on foundation models — including open releases such as Nvidia's Alpamayo and Qwen's vision-language-action models — have collapsed the entry cost. Startups are now deploying within months on less than $1 million raised. Many of the 81 are pure robotaxi plays aiming at Waymo, but plenty are targeting construction, warehouses, agriculture and mining, where a regional niche player can win without beating a giant everywhere.
The deals proving the money is real
- Bedrock Robotics, which makes construction vehicles autonomous, raised a $600 million Series C valuing it at $4.1 billion, co-led by CapitalG and Emergence Capital, with Nvidia taking part.
- Re:Build, a manufacturing accelerator co-founded by former Amazon commercial CEO Jeff Wilke, raised $2.1 billion.
- Kodiak AI will deliver 75 self-driving trucks to DTL Transport starting in 2028.
- Waymo and Toyota locked in a manufacturing partnership: Toyota will build AV-ready bZ4X vehicles carrying Waymo's system in Japan, for robotaxi services in Japan, the UK and beyond.
The lesson is bigger than cars. When foundation models make the "brain" cheap, robots stop being science projects for billionaires and become businesses a small team can start. That is exactly how a technology wave becomes an industry.
Free tools to start learning robotics and AV
- LeRobot by Hugging Face — free open-source library for real-world robot learning.
- ROS (Robot Operating System) — the free framework most of the world's robots run on.
- NVIDIA Isaac — free developer platform for simulating and training robots.
Source: TechCrunch Mobility.
