Now Embark is preparing to go public through a merger with Northern Genesis Acquisition Corp II, a special-purpose acquisition company, or SPAC.
Along the way, Embark raised $117 million from a group of investors that included the high-profile venture-capital firms Tiger Global Management and Sequoia Capital. It reached 100,000 miles of tests on public roads in 2018 and began to haul freight for Fortune 500 companies in 2019. The startup moved quickly, completing what it says was the first coast-to-coast trip driven by an autonomous truck in 2017. This, he said, was exactly the kind of problem he and Moak wanted to solve, one with clear technical parameters and the opportunity to make a "massive" economic influence.īy 2017, Rodrigues had given Varden a new name, Embark, and a revised mission: to develop self-driving software for heavy-duty trucks. Varden initially focused on building autonomous shuttles for college campuses, but Rodrigues said he had an epiphany after trucking companies began reaching out to him to ask if Varden's tech could power big rigs. That year, Rodrigues won a Thiel Fellowship, and Varden earned a spot in the prestigious startup incubator Y Combinator. So in 2016, the two dropped out of the University of Waterloo and founded Varden Labs. Rodrigues said he feared that if he and Moak waited until after graduation to join the fray, they'd fall behind. "It was clear the technology we built was actually pretty unique," Rodrigues told Insider.Īfter Google launched the autonomous-vehicle industry in 2009, a new wave of competitors, including Cruise and Zoox, was beginning to pop up in the mid-2010s. Their project may have looked like a mere hobby from the outside, but Rodrigues felt he and Moak were onto something. In 2015, the summer after his junior year of college, 19-year-old Alex Rodrigues was in his parents' garage building a self-driving golf cart with his classmate Brandon Moak. It's preparing to go public through a SPAC deal expected to raise $614 million.Embark is developing self-driving and fleet-management software for semitrucks.Alex Rodrigues, 25, cofounded Embark in 2016 and is now the startup's CEO.
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