Exclusive: Ex-TuSimple CEO Pivots from San Diego and Raises $20M For New Self-Driving Trucking Startup
Xiaodi Hou co-founded one of the hottest unicorn tech startups, can he do it again?
Three years ago, self-driving big-rig trucking company TuSimple was flying high in 2021, the newly-minted unicorn was once San Diego’s hottest software startup — fresh off a successful IPO, valuing the company at $8.5 billion. The rise and fall of TuSimple was widely covered by news outlets over the last twelve months.
By 2021, TuSimple had 70 autonomous trucks on the road globally and was known as one of the leaders in the autonomous trucking industry. At its peak, the company had over 900 employees, with a market capitalization per employee of about $11 million.
That valuation quickly tanked after the WSJ first reported the company was facing a federal investigation by the SEC in October 2023, related to illegal ties to a Chinese entity. A year later, it saw an exodus of talent including layoffs of hundreds of employees in the span of months, and eventually announced that that company shut down its U.S. operations pivoting into AI gaming.
Xiaodi Hou, one of the co-founders at TuSimple, is now back with a new startup called Bot Auto, another driverless trucking startup and has just announced its $20 million funding round led by nine different venture firms.
Bot Auto’s investors include Brightway Future Venture, Cherubic Venture, EnvisionX Venture, First Star Venture, Linear Capital, M31 Capital, Taihill Venture and Uphonest Venture.
Mr. Hou shared his lessons from scaling TuSimple, why he decided to move to Texas from San Diego, and what’s next for his ambitious self-driving trucking company.