The Future of Transportation: A Conversation with Reilly Brennan 

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In this episode of Tech Cars Machines, host Ali Tabibian sits down with Reilly Brennan, a returning guest and partner at Trucks VC.  He is the author of the must-read “Future of Transportation” newsletter.  Reilly shared his insights on the evolving landscape of transportation investment, highlighting trends in decarbonization, global entrepreneurship, and the dynamics of venture capital in the sector.  Reilly’s perspective is that of an early-stage investor. 

“We are often the first check in a company’s life that’s making transportation safer, cleaner, more accessible.” – Reilly Brennan

Round sizes are increasing, including the occasional $10MM seed round! Trucks depends on larger funds and especially generalist investors for follow-on financings.  While San Francisco is still the center, opportunities are increasingly global with India and Sweden being two recent areas of activity.  

"We're fascinated by the next two years of product development and product releases in the EV sector." – Reilly Brennan

Amongst the larger deals, year to date $95 billion dollars was raised of which about $30 billion had a legitimate “AI” nexus to it.  Of the 190 companies involved 79 were in California (29 in San Francisco) and 24 in New York.  

“There’s this kind of entity behind the scenes which is Nvidia taking 30% off of all these finance rounds.” – Reilly Brennan

The $1 billion + financing by autonomy company Wayve re-kindled interest in the autonomy sector, especially when it comes to robotics.  And it indicated the re-emergence of SoftBank in the sector.  This wave of funding around AI is going to look very bloated and enormous, but when we get to the other side of it, we're going enable much smaller teams to build something of great business value with millions or billions of real actual realized value.