Logistics Tech Review: Autonomous truck startups take PPP loans, Locus Robotics reveals number of customers

Jul 10, 2020

Hello and welcome to the second edition of Logistics Tech Review.

This week, the US Small Business Administration released the list of PPP loan recipients, including several autonomous vehicle startups and companies. Meanwhile, warehouse robotics continues to grow, and new technology partnerships are being formed in trucking.

While more than 3200 trucking companies received loans from the United States Small Business Administration through the Paycheck Protection Program, several venture-backed companies in the autonomous vehicle space also received millions in order to weather the COVID-19 downturn and avoid layoffs.
(Image: TuSimple)
These companies include TuSimple and Kodiak Robotics, autonomous trucking startups, and LiDAR manufacturers Velodyne and AEye.
Meanwhile, Locus Robotics revealed their leadership in the collaborative robotics space, disclosing a total of 28 customers among 50 deployments of their robots-as-a-service solution.
(Image: Locus Robotics)
Last week, Amazon had announced their first robotics fulfillment center in Australia, adding to its existing list of 50 robotics fulfillment centers and 100,000 plus strong fleet of drive robots.
Hyundai delivered its first hydrogen fuel-celled commercial trucks to Switzerland. It plans to roll out 1600 trucks by 2025, materializing the auto OEM’s bet on fuel cell trucks. It is currently developing similar long-distance trucks with a 600 mile range for the North America market.
Convoy, a digital freight broker and software company, announced a partnership with KeepTruckin to provide its platform customers access to en-route shipment locations from consenting trucks with KeepTruckin’s popular ELD. Carriers on the Convoy platform will in turn get a 15% discount on KeepTruckin products and services.

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