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Trucking & Rail Nov 7, 2026 · 8 min read

Electric truck funding: Harbinger and Humble raise $291m

Electric trucks are winning the short routes, and FedEx is paying for proof

On Thursday 5 November, investors put $291 million into two US electric truck companies. Harbinger, a California maker of medium-duty electric and hybrid truck chassis, raised a $240 million Series D, a late-stage funding round. Humble Robotics, which is building a driverless electric container hauler with no cab at all, raised a $51 million Series A, an early-stage round.

Humble says batteries work best on short, repeatable routes, and Harbinger’s delivery trucks already run them. Our view is that they are right about the routes, but only one of them has the proof a forwarder should care about. Harbinger has a customer that has ordered 2,000 trucks. Humble has a design, a spec sheet and no named customer. The money is real in both cases. The freight capacity is real in only one.

What was announced

Harbinger builds Class 4 to 6 chassis. These are medium-duty trucks: step vans, box trucks and the kind of vehicle that does city pickup and delivery. It makes all-electric and plug-in hybrid versions. Its Series D was co-led by Tiger Global, Capricorn’s Technology Impact Fund and Ridgeline, FreightWaves reports. Fidelity, Squarepoint Capital and Xantium joined as crossover investors, meaning funds that usually back companies close to a stock-market listing. FedEx and THOR Industries came in as strategic investors. The valuation was not disclosed.

Harbinger says it has raised more than $650 million since it was founded. The round follows a $160 million Series C last November, when FedEx placed an initial order for 53 trucks, according to FreightWaves. TechCrunch reports that Harbinger is weighing going public.

The new money is not only for trucks. Harbinger is moving into energy storage, power generation, autonomy and defence. It is building a platform for an uncrewed US Army supply vehicle under a contract with American Rheinmetall, with no contract value disclosed. CEO John Harris framed it in the release: “Electrification is at the core of everything we do.” Tiger Global partner Griffin Schroeder went further: “Harbinger excels at electrification, and electrification has become one of the most pressing bottlenecks of the AI era.”

Humble Robotics is a younger company. Its $51 million Series A was led by Obvious Ventures, with existing investors Eclipse and Energy Impact Partners joining. That brings total funding to $75 million, about six months after it came out of stealth with a $24 million seed round, FreightWaves reports. The money is for customer pilots, testing, early manufacturing and a wider family of vehicles. Humble plans to sell its haulers to third-party operators rather than run them itself.

The Humble Hauler is a flat electric platform. It has no cab and no driver. It carries 40ft international and 53ft domestic containers. Its stated limits are a 200-mile maximum range and a 55 mph top speed. The company says it is about 20% lighter than a standard tractor and trailer. The target uses it lists are port drayage (the short truck move between a terminal and a warehouse or rail yard), plant-to-warehouse shuttles, rail-yard moves and short legs between a carrier’s own terminals.

Why the short-route bet makes sense

The case for short routes is mostly about arithmetic. FreightWaves cites 2021 federal data showing that routes under 250 miles carry 87% of US truck tonnage, and moves under 100 miles carry 44%. That is a very large market that never needs a truck to cross a state overnight.

Short routes also suit batteries. A truck that comes back to the same depot every night can charge there. It does not need public chargers along a highway. Humble’s CEO, Eyal Cohen, put it simply: “Short moves are served very well by electrification.” He contrasted that with long haul: “Long haul is tougher in electrification, right?” On short runs, he said, “You could have a depot nearby.”

Weight matters too. Batteries are heavy, and trucks have legal weight limits. A lighter vehicle can carry more cargo within those limits. Cohen’s pitch is to win back some of that: “The goal is to take more weight per move if we can to reduce the cost per mile as well.”

The market data supports the short end. Zero-emission trucks reached a record 4.14% of US truck deployments in the second half of 2025, according to CALSTART data cited by FreightWaves. That happened even as total truck sales fell 35% year on year, FreightWaves adds.

But look at what those trucks are. Truck Parts and Service, reporting on the same CALSTART data, says 72,309 zero-emission trucks were deployed in the US through 2025. Of those, 64,209, or nearly 89%, were cargo vans. Only 2,509 were heavy-duty trucks deployed between 2017 and 2025. That is under 3.5% of all zero-emission trucks and 0.046% of heavy-duty deployments over the period, the article says. The article’s verdict on the heavy end was blunt: “The Class 8 market has none of that.” Class 8 is the heaviest truck class, which includes the tractors that pull containers.

So the electric truck market is real, but it is small, and it is almost all vans and city trucks. That is Harbinger’s ground. Humble is trying to move into the heavy, container-carrying end, where almost nothing has worked yet.

What happened last time

Forwarders have heard big electric truck promises before. The best-known failure is Nikola. It filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on 19 February 2025, Heavy Duty Trucking reported. Nikola said it could not find a buyer or more funding. Its CEO, Steve Girsky, said at the time: “Unfortunately, our very best efforts have not been enough to overcome these significant challenges.”

Policy has also turned against forced adoption at the ports. California’s Advanced Clean Fleets rule would have made drayage fleets buy zero-emission trucks. In January 2025, the state’s Air Resources Board withdrew its request for the federal waiver it needed to enforce those mandates on private trucks, and in late 2025 its board voted to repeal the provisions, Container News reports. “That deadline is effectively gone,” the outlet wrote.

Some pressure remains. At the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, cargo owners still pay a Clean Truck Fund rate of $10 per loaded TEU (twenty-foot equivalent unit), or $20 for larger containers, when the truck is not zero-emission, Container News reports. The ports have collected well over $100 million this way. Their clean air plan targets a fully zero-emission drayage fleet by 2035. But with no purchase mandate, electric drayage now has to win on cost.

That is the lesson from last time. Electric trucks sold on vision struggled. Electric trucks sold to a fleet with a fixed route and a depot charger are the ones that kept growing. Harbinger’s FedEx deal fits the second pattern. Humble still has to prove it does.

What it means for forwarders

Start with pickup and delivery (P&D), the city trucks that collect and drop freight. This is where the change is happening now. FedEx’s order for 2,000 Harbinger trucks, worth more than $300 million and due by the end of 2027, is the benchmark. FedEx’s Paul Melander has joined Harbinger’s board, TechCrunch reports. When a parcel giant both buys the truck and owns part of the maker, other large delivery fleets notice.

For forwarders, that means some local delivery partners will run electric or hybrid trucks within the next year or two. In practice, it may show up as new questions from shippers about emissions per shipment, and as partners who can report them. It is unlikely to change delivery rates much in the short term. Harbinger has not disclosed its production capacity, and Harris told Bloomberg in September that it had finished its 1,000th vehicle, FreightWaves reports. Two thousand more by end-2027 is a ramp, not a flood.

Range is still a constraint, even in medium-duty. FreightWaves reports that Harbinger’s HC Series cab, unveiled in March, has a gasoline range extender “good for up to 500 miles, depending on configuration.” That is a hybrid. The fact that a leading electric truck maker adds a gas engine for range tells you where pure battery trucks still fall short.

Drayage is a different story. Humble is not selling anything yet. Cohen said in August the company was “aiming for customer pilots over the next 12 months.” That points to around August 2027 for the first pilots. No customers are named. And driverless trucks on public roads need more than a working vehicle. They need operators, insurers and local approvals.

There is a near comparison. Gatik, which already runs autonomous routes of up to 400 miles between distribution centres and stores, raised a $200 million Series D in August after completing 85,000 fully driverless orders, FreightWaves reports. That is what a few years of proof looks like. Humble is at the start of that road.

So for now, a forwarder’s dray costs, driver availability and chassis shortages are unchanged by Thursday’s news. The Clean Truck Fund rate is still a line on the bill at San Pedro Bay. Drayage rates will still move with volumes and driver supply, not with venture rounds.

Our call

We think the money will keep flowing to short, return-to-base electric trucks, and that delivery fleets will adopt them well before container drayage does.

Our specific call: Humble’s first announced pilot will be a closed yard, plant or terminal shuttle, not a public-road port dray. No Humble hauler will carry paying port containers on public roads before July 2027. We also expect Harbinger to announce at least one more large fleet order from a delivery or parcel operator before the end of Q2 2027, as investors push it toward a stock-market listing.

Sources

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