Shifting into Next Gear: How FERNRIDE’s Autonomous Trucking Solution is Accelerating the Digital Transformation of the Supply Chain
By Timur Davis and Blake Pennington
Much ink has been spilled in recent years on the supply chain challenges faced by the global economy. From pandemic-related labor shortages to technology-driven shifts in the marketplace, consumers the world over have felt the impacts of the supply chain crunch. The ‘Future of Transportation’ has long been a key area of emphasis for Munich Re Ventures (MRV), as we look to better assess and mitigate key risks related to global supply chains. As organizations experience continued pressure to improve operations, drive profitability, and safely transport people, goods, and data across land, air, sea (and even space!), it is essential that cutting edge technologies are deployed to further this effort.
As MRV has examined solutions addressing key supply chain challenges (ex. shipping delays, labor shortages, unscheduled downtime, antiquated infrastructure, among others), a winning recipe has become clear — deploying ambitious new technology in an incremental fashion (critically, while still commercializing in the present). This step-change approach allows companies to achieve two key aims: generating immediate revenue streams while also collecting invaluable, specialized datasets to help iterate and more rapidly improve their offering over time.
Today, next generation technologies, such as robotics and artificial intelligence, are laying the foundation for step-change advancements in logistics and automation. Machines can now execute common, menial, or dangerous tasks, accelerating the production and delivery of goods or services, while also relieving labor shortages and improving safety. Nowhere has this been more prevalent than supply chain yards and ports, where demand for drivers and peak operations capacities are highly volatile and concentrated around deliveries.
It is against this backdrop that we are proud to announce our investment in FERNRIDE’s Series A round. FERNRIDE’s autonomous trucking platform provides a solution for precisely these types of supply chain challenges. This unique human-assisted approach to autonomy enables a driver to simultaneously manage multiple autonomous vehicles at disparate locations, easing effects of the truckdriver shortage while also automating the moving of freight and cargo across short distances in closed environments. FERNRIDE’s initial target market focuses on vehicles designed to move semi-trailers across ports, distribution centers, warehouses, receiving facilities, and intermodal depots. The company is building its platform through a gradual approach — beginning with teleoperations, but incrementally working towards level 4 autonomy (where a vehicle operates without a human driver).
Starting with ports and supply chain yards has several intrinsic advantages. Such facilities are closed environments (physically and geofenced) that operate on non-public roadways, creating specialized and predictable circumstances. Pragmatic safety procedures govern these spaces: mandated regulations, site-wide speed limits, few (if any) pedestrians, and consistent weather conditions. These environments are filled with highly repeatable and scalable tasks where trucks operate on virtual rails — predetermined pathways over short distances move freight between cranes, delivery points, staging, and loading areas.
With limited variability, such spaces require a much lower technical lift to automate safety functionality as compared with the wider world at large. They also allow FERNRIDE to gather customer-specific data for more complex automations and edge cases. Furthermore, by allowing a teleoperator to intervene in challenging moments, the company’s platform enables trucks to get back to work faster, without the need for a systems engineer or technical expert to troubleshoot issues.
Taking a human-assisted autonomy approach positions FERNRIDE for both near-term and long-term success. The company’s ability to convert early pilots into enterprise customers (including logos such as Volkswagen, HHLA, and DB Schenker) is reflective of the company’s immediate value add. This value proposition will only grow with time, further scaling as the teleoperator to vehicle ratio grows.
Moving directly to level 4 autonomy (and from level 4 to level 5 autonomy) is no small thing. It takes immense resources, expenses, and development time to address edge cases and offer a truly autonomous experience — a stumbling block for many other companies in the market. FERNRIDE’s ability to seamlessly switch from autonomous operations to teleoperations when needed, as well as switch drivers between vehicles across facilities, gives a single operator the flexibility to manage a fleet of vehicles across multiple locations in real-time. It allows for level 4 autonomy for mundane tasks (e.g., moving freight along predetermined routes) and teleoperations for more complex maneuvers (e.g., loading/unloading or avoiding obstacles.).
It is abundantly clear that autonomous mobility will have dramatic implications for the automotive insurance market, including commercial trucking. With Munich Re playing a key role in providing insurance and reinsurance products to this industry, developments in autonomous trucking are of great interest.
“FERNRIDE contributes a state-of-the-art solution to the automation of logistics. FERNRIDE matches tremendously well with the ERGO Mobility Solutions approach of enabling the transition to automated and safer mobility by providing innovative insurance models, as well as leading tech-solutions via the Mobility Technology Center,” shares Andreas Bradt, Director of Technology and Innovation at ERGO Mobility Solutions and Managing Director of Munich Re’s Mobility Technology Center.
FERNRIDE is led by CEO Hendrik Kramer, who previously focused on autonomous driving while at the Stanford Center for Design Research. He has assembled a leadership team with over 100 aggregated years of industry experience at industry-leading organizations including BMW, Audi, Argo, Mobileye, Zoox, Tesla, and MAN.
Our investment in Fernride offers a front row seat to this emerging market with a first-rate team of transportation veterans — and we’re thrilled to be along for the ride.
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Munich Re Ventures (MRV) is the venture capital arm of Munich Re Group, one of the world’s leading providers of reinsurance, primary insurance, and insurance-related risk solutions. With more than $1 billion in assets under management, Munich Re Ventures invests in the most innovative start-ups transforming the future of risk and risk transfer. MRV’s experienced investors are financially-driven while focused on the strategic interests of Munich Re and the broader insurance industry. MRV works closely with Munich Re Group businesses across the globe to fund and partner with the best emerging companies developing new technologies and business models — and risks — for tomorrow’s world.
