Top Automotive Startups in North America

KeepTruckin is a San Francisco-based company that serves more than one million drivers and over 100,000 businesses that power the physical economy by equipping them with the technology needed to improve the safety and efficiency of their operations. Shoaib Makani and his co-founders Ryan Johns and Obaid Khan founded the company in 2013 to serve the trucking industry, a workforce that is essential to the economy but underserved by technology. Today, KeepTruckin’s 400,000-strong network of connected vehicles, ranging from small trucking companies to Fortune 500 enterprises, is one of the largest in North America. The products that KeepTruckin builds deliver integrated value for a diverse range of industries, from construction and oil and gas to distribution and moving and storage. At every turn, KeepTruckin provides cutting-edge hardware and software that leverages the latest advancements in AI and computer vision to solve a broad range of problems for businesses with vehicles — spanning video-based driver safety, Electronic Logging Device (ELD) compliance, GPS tracking, dispatch, and fuel and maintenance. KeepTruckin’s series E round valued the company at $2.3 billion, and it currently employs more than 2,400 people worldwide.

Turo is a car sharing marketplace where guests can book any car they want, wherever they want it, from a vibrant community of local hosts across the US, Canada, the UK, France & Australia. Guests choose from a totally unique selection of nearby cars, while hosts earn extra money to offset the costs of car ownership. A pioneer of the sharing economy and the travel industry, Turo is a safe, supportive community where the car you book is part of a story, not a fleet.

Caribou is a fast-growing, mission-driven fintech that delivers financial security and peace of mind to consumers by providing better auto refinancing, insurance and financial protection products. Through our partnerships with top local and community lenders, we bring customers great rates and lower monthly payments. Our secure, digital platform makes it easy for our customers to see exactly how much they can save and complete the refinance process quickly, all from the comfort of their home. What's more, we do all the heavy lifting, including paying off the old lender as well as re-titling the vehicle, saving our customers those dreaded trips to the DMV.

Kodiak was founded in 2018 to redefine long-haul trucking using safe and reliable autonomous technology. Between growing e-commerce and a strong economy, demand for trucking is on the rise. The trucking industry faces major problems: a shortage of drivers, difficult working conditions, and extremely high turnover. According to the American Trucking Association, the industry faced a shortage of 51,000 commercial truck drivers at the end of 2017. Long-haul trucking is primed for autonomous technology. Highway driving is more structured and predictable than urban driving. This means there are fewer decisions for drivers to make and a better fit for autonomous vehicles. We believe that autonomous trucks will play a major role in filling the gap while improving safety, enhancing truck driver quality of life, increasing efficiency, reducing congestion and emissions and creating jobs across the economy.

Through the development of a first of its kind open platform, Platform Science provides the hardware and software that allows clients to fully capture, analyze and apply a wealth of data, dramatically increasing performance, compliance, time management and savings.

At Veo, we're bringing the next generation of mobility sharing to cities and universities globally through our dockless pedal bike, e-bike and e-scooter systems. We also offer fat-tire bikes, cargo bikes and ADA-compliant bikes – making us the only shared mobility provider with this breadth of options. We design and engineer our own vehicles, hardware and software systems to provide a greener, healthier mode of transportation to make the communities we serve more sustainable and livable. Our mission is to offer the best combination of multi-modal sharing technology and seamless customer service, so users can unlock joy in their day. We are looking for exceptionally talented individuals who are ready to take on exciting challenges and own solutions. We are headquartered in Chicago, IL, but we are hiring across the U.S. Join us!

SpaceX designs, manufactures and launches advanced rockets and spacecraft. The company was founded in 2002 to revolutionize space technology, with the ultimate goal of enabling people to live on other planets. SpaceX has gained worldwide attention for a series of historic milestones. It is the only private company capable of returning a spacecraft from low Earth orbit, which it first accomplished in 2010. The company made history again in 2012 when its Dragon spacecraft became the first commercial spacecraft to deliver cargo to and from the International Space Station. SpaceX successfully achieved the historic first reflight of an orbital class rocket in 2017, and the company now regularly launches flight-proven rockets. In 2018, SpaceX began launching Falcon Heavy, the world’s most powerful operational rocket by a factor of two. As one of the world’s fastest growing providers of launch services, SpaceX has secured over 100 missions to its manifest, representing over $12 billion on contract. These include commercial satellite launches as well as US government missions. SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft is flying numerous cargo resupply missions to the space station under a series of Commercial Resupply Services contracts. Dragon was designed from the outset to carry humans to space and will soon fly astronauts under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. Building on the achievements of Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, SpaceX is working on a next generation of fully reusable launch vehicles that will be the most powerful ever built, capable of carrying humans to Mars and other destinations in the solar system.

Applied Intuition provides software infrastructure to safely develop, test, and deploy autonomous vehicles at scale. Industry leading companies of all sizes use Applied to comprehensively test and rapidly accelerate their autonomous vehicle development.

Headquartered in Santa Barbara, Calif., ShipHawk is shipping software for high volume shippers. Most businesses spend a ton of time and money trying to ship orders more efficiently. ShipHawk’s shipping software helps automate order fulfillment and eliminate worker decisions so businesses can take control of their warehouse operations. To learn more about ShipHawk, please visit shiphawk.com.

AirGarage is repurposing the 30% of real estate in the average American city currently dedicated to parking. We are building a future where real estate is digitized and can be transitioned from one use to another seamlessly on-demand, moving every piece of urban real estate toward its highest and best use. We are starting with the $131 billion US parking real estate market because it is one of the most offline and mismanaged commercial real estate asset types. As a full-stack parking operator, we automate the operation of parking lots and parking garages. We handle everything from advertising to collecting payments from drivers and enforcing against illegal parking. We already operate 150+ parking lots and parking garages across 30 US states and we are growing quickly. We are backed by top tier investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Floodgate, Founders Fund, and angel investors who have founded or worked at companies like Uber, Opendoor, Flexport, and more.