By Brian Caldwell. This is an excerpt from an article originally published on Engineering News.
A startup founded by second-year Waterloo Engineering students just five years ago would have a market capitalization of US $5.16 billion under a proposed merger to make it a publicly traded company.
Embark Trucks, which is based in San Francisco, was launched by former mechatronics engineering students Alex Rodrigues and Brandon Moak to bring autonomous technology to the trucking industry.
After meeting during their studies at Waterloo, Rodrigues and Moak made their first public splash in 2015 by driving Feridun Hamdullahpur, president and vice-chancellor of the University, around the Ring Road in an autonomous golf cart they had built in a garage.
A forerunner of Embark, Varden Labs, also involved engineering classmate Michael Skupien and got its start with help from a $25,000 win in the Velocity pitch competition for student startups at the University of Waterloo.
Co-Founders Alex Rodriguez and Brandon Moak are former BET 300 and Entrepreneurship Co-op students at the Conrad School.
Read the full story on the Faculty of Engineering website.
Embark Trucks founders of US $5B trucking company urges Waterloo students to 'just build things'. Read more on Waterloo News.