Two former Waterloo Engineering students who launched a self-driving trucking company that is now poised to go public with an estimated valuation of more than US $5 billion have been honoured by a national business group in the United States.
Embark Trucks, which was founded by second-year mechatronics engineering classmates Alex Rodrigues and Brandon Moak, recently received one of eight 2021 business achievement awards from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Alex Rodrigues, left, and Brandon Moak founded Embark Trucks while they were sill students at Waterloo Engineering.
Based in San Francisco, the company won in the Young Entrepreneur category for small business owners, founders and co-founders 30 and under who have “attained outstanding business achievement.”
After meeting during their studies at Waterloo, Rodrigues and Moak were first in the spotlight when they drove Feridun Hamdullahpur, then president and vice-chancellor of the University of Waterloo, around the Ring Road in 2015 in an autonomous golf cart they had built in a garage.
Just six years later, a proposed merger is expected to close next month with Northern Genesis 2, a special purpose acquisition company headed by Ian Robertson (BASc ’82), an alumnus who earned an electrical engineering degree at Waterloo.
The deal would provide Embark with US $614 million to fund commercialization of its autonomous software for long-distance trucking fleets and give it a valuation of US $5.16 billion.