UPS Ventures, the venture capital arm of UPS, has made a minority investment in autonomous trucking company TuSimple. The companies are testing self-driving semi-trucks in Arizona to determine whether the vehicles can improve UPS’ service and efficiency. This is an extension of the ongoing commercial relationship between UPS and TuSimple in which UPS has purchased…
Driverless investment tops $1.6B so far this month
After last week’s $582 million in funding for autonomous vehicle companies, you might think that driverless investment would coast for a while. However, this week saw more than $1 billion in support for developing self-driving cars and trucks. President’s Day is traditionally the time for car sales, but the automakers and big technology companies are…
TuSimple gets heavy-duty funding for autonomous fleet
TuSimple, which is developing self-driving trucks, today said that it has raised $95 million in Series D funding. The San Diego startup has a valuation of $1 billion and plans to use the investment for further development and commercialization. Chinese media company Sina Corp. led the round, and Hong Kong-based Composite Capital participated. After its…
TUSimple’s Deep Learning Approach to Self-Driving Trucks
At NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference, I spoke with Xiaodi Hou, co-founder and CTO of TuSimple, a startup that is employing artificial intelligence to drive R&D of an SAE Level 4 autonomous trucking solution. Founded in 2015, the company has created a low-cost, commercially viable self-driving system to address a variety of pain points in the…