Bot Auto

Bot Auto is a US startup headquartered in Houston, Texas, developing autonomous Class 8 trucks and a driverless freight-hauling service. It was founded by Xiaodi Hou, co-founder and former CEO of TuSimple. Rather than selling trucks equipped with autonomous software, Bot Auto offers transportation-as-a-service. Its core technology, the "Bot Auto Driver", combines a foundation model fusing camera, lidar and radar data, a world model forecasting the motion of other vehicles, and reinforcement-learning-based trajectory planning, with a mirrored fail-safe architecture. Test and operational routes run on Texas highways, including Houston to Dallas and San Antonio (the I-10 corridor). In September 2024 the company emerged from stealth with a $20M oversubscribed pre-Series A round. In 2025 it completed humanless driver-out validation runs and secured insurance for commercial operations. Hardware partners include NVIDIA and Lenovo (the Lenovo AD1 platform built on NVIDIA Hyperion).