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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 classmate Brandon Moak. Their project may have looked like a mere hobby from the outside, but Rodrigues felt he and Moak were onto something. "It was clear the technology we built was actually pretty unique," Rodrigues told Insider.
After 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. Rodrigues feared that if he and Moak waited until after graduation to join the fray, they'd fall behind. So in 2016, the two dropped out of the University of Waterloo and founded Varden Labs. That year, Rodrigues won a Thiel Fellowship and Varden earned a spot in the prestigious startup incubator Y Combinator.
Varden initially focused on building autonomous shuttles for college campuses, but Rodrigues had an epiphany after trucking companies began reaching out to him to ask if Varden's tech could power big rigs. This, he realized, 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 impact.
By 2017, Rodrigues had given Varden a new name, Embark, and a revised mission: to develop self-driving software for heavy-duty trucks. The startup moved quickly, completing what it says was the first coast-to-coast trip driven by an autonomous truck in 2017, reaching 100,000 miles of tests on public roads in 2018, and beginning to haul freight for Fortune 500 companies in 2019. 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.
Now, Embark is preparing to go public through a merger with Northern Genesis Acquisition Corp II, a special-purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. The deal is expected to raise $614 million for Embark — enough cash to fund operations until the startup begins earning enough revenue to finance itself, Rodrigues said — and leave the company with a $5 billion market capitalization. Embark and Northern Genesis expect the deal to close before the end of this year.
Though Embark has plenty of competition, Rodrigues said it has built better technology than some of its larger rivals with a smaller team. (Embark had 147 employees as of June 30; players like Cruise, Argo, Aurora, and Waymo can have 10 times that number.) Part of Embark's technological edge, according to Rodrigues, is its software's ability to recognize how real-world conditions compare to the pre-made maps it uses for guidance. The startup's test vehicles have now driven more than 1 million miles without a major collision.
But Rodrigues realizes there's still plenty of work to do. In June, the day Embark announced its deal with Northern Genesis, he sent an email to the company titled, "Welcome to the starting line."
Are you a current or former Embark employee? Do you have a news tip or opinion you'd like to share? Contact this reporter at mmatousek@insider.com, on Signal at 646-768-4712, or via his encrypted email address mmatousek@protonmail.com.
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