Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility, your hub for the future of transportation and now, more than ever, the role AI is playing in it. To get this in your inbox, sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! I’ve joked here and on the Equity and Autonocast podcasts that the autonomous vehicle industry feels a lot like 2016, at least in terms of the buzziness surrounding the sector.
But a recent conversation with Trucks VC partner Puneeth Meruva has me rethinking that comparison. There’s evidence that 2026 is even hotter — at least by certain measures — than those frothy dealmaking days of 2016 and 2017. Trucks VC, which specializes in early-stage investing, has fielded pitches from 81 new autonomous vehicle startups so far in 2026 — two-thirds more than last year and enough to surpass the boom years of a decade ago.
The VC firm argues in a new blog post that we’re in the midst of a second, even bigger AV wave fueled by technological breakthroughs. Yes, I’m talking about AI. The arrival of powerful open source models like Nvidia’s Alpamayo and Qwen’s general-purpose vision-language-action models has made it even easier for startups to get off the ground.
The barrier to entry is lower than ever before. Meruva said Trucks is consistently seeing startups deploy within a few months and with less than $1 million raised. (And while Meruva wouldn’t name names, the firm has invested in some of them.) Of these 81 startups that pitched Trucks VC, I mistakenly assumed most would be applying their AV tech to construction, warehouse, agriculture, and mining. And yes, those were in the mix.
But what surprised me was the growing number of startups pitching pure-play robotaxi businesses. And many are positioning themselves as direct competitors to Waymo. As wild and galaxy brain-thinking as that may sound, Meruva thinks there is room for smaller players.
And Meruva doesn’t see the pace flattening. He expects even more AV startups to pitch the firm next year. Regular readers of this newsletter know we’ve been closely following Slate Auto — breaking the original story on Jeff Bezos’ investment way back in April 2025.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
