# Trucks VC Says It Has Seen 81 Autonomous-Vehicle Startups in 2026

By Simon Yoon

Canonical URL: https://www.tokenpost.com/news/technology/45941
Published: 2026-11-01T17:14:36.000Z
Updated: 2026-11-01T17:14:36.000Z
Section: Technology

> The firm’s decade of tracking covers 582 early-stage autonomy companies. Its latest figure does not establish when those businesses were founded.

Trucks Venture Capital says its records show 81 newly observed autonomous-vehicle startups so far in 2026, more than its count for any complete year since the firm launched in 2015.

The tally reflects companies the firm says it has seen, rather than a confirmed count of businesses founded this year. Trucks VC has not identified the 81 companies or explained the criteria it uses to include a startup.

The firm says its decade of tracking spans 582 pre-seed and seed-stage autonomy startups working across passenger vehicles, commercial trucks, aviation and aerospace. Trucks VC describes an earlier wave of autonomous-vehicle startups as running roughly from 2016 through 2019, followed by a cooling period in 2020.

Trucks VC connects increased activity from 2024 onward with foundation models and large language models applied to driving. The firm characterizes nearly all the startups it has seen as built on foundation models, but has not named the models used by the companies in its 2026 tally.

Trucks VC partner Puneeth Meruva said the models provide a technical path to end-to-end autonomous-driving systems. “And I think the foundation models now provide a technical architecture that makes those end-to-end systems possible,” Meruva said.

NVIDIA announced Aug. 4 that its Alpamayo 2 Super model for autonomous vehicles was available for commercial use. The announcement does not identify any of the startups in Trucks VC’s tally as users of the model.