Fernride, launched in 2019 in Germany, aims to tackle the driver shortage and environmental impact of transportation by introducing autonomous and electric trucking. Their innovative approach allows drivers to remotely control trucks from an office, effectively operating vehicles across great distances, such as from Munich to the U.K. This method separates the driver's location from the truck's, enhancing logistic and production efficiency. Fernride has raised $59 million to date and coins Volkswagen and DB Schenker as clients. Founded by Hendrik Kramer, who pivoted from selling dressage horses online to dropping out of his Master's at the Technical University of Munich, Fernride is pioneering the use of human teleoperators to oversee a fleet of up to ten trucks in geo-fenced locations and private yards, aiming for higher productivity and sustainability.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00 Hendrik, thank you so much for being here today with me.
00:02 Thank you for having me.
00:03 Of course. So explain it to me in the most basic of terms.
00:07 What exactly does your company do?
00:09 Yeah, FernRide offers a solution for autonomous electric trucking.
00:13 So why do we do this?
00:15 We want to make our supply chains more resilient.
00:18 So trucking, what is really the backbone of global trade,
00:21 is facing major problems with the labor shortages.
00:24 So alone in Europe, we have a shortage of 2 million truck drivers by 2026.
00:30 And it's super important that when we have increasing volumes in transportation
00:34 and fewer truck drivers, that we solve this issue.
00:37 Since otherwise, those moments that everyone remembers from COVID times,
00:41 when you enter a supermarket and there's empty supermarket shelves,
00:45 this will become the new normal.
00:47 And therefore, we decided, hey, let's face this problem and tackle it
00:51 and offer a solution to overcome the truck driver shortage
00:54 and also electrify the trucking industry.
00:58 And how we do this is that we actually start very pragmatic.
01:02 Since when you were speaking about autonomous vehicles,
01:04 everyone thinks, this is so far away, it's a moonshot.
01:07 There were so many promises and we want to be very pragmatic
01:11 and offer a solution now.
01:12 And what we did there is that we tackle use cases that work
01:16 in constrained environments where you have a geo-fenced area,
01:19 for example, in a port, so a container terminal where cargo is moved
01:24 at relatively low speeds.
01:26 And that's where autonomous driving works today.
01:29 And this is what FernRide's USP is that we combine in our approach
01:34 to autonomy, we call this human-assisted autonomy.
01:37 Really the best out of both worlds, human intelligence
01:40 and artificial intelligence in a hybrid setup.
01:43 So how exactly does that work and who is the one controlling it or using it?
01:48 Yeah, so when you imagine a truck driver today,
01:51 we take that same person, bring it into an office location in that port,
01:57 let them remotely drive the vehicles.
01:59 And there's obviously not so much benefit when you just have it one-to-one,
02:04 bring the person from truck to an office.
02:06 But as our trucks are already driving 80 to 90% of the time autonomously
02:12 right now, this person can manage today four trucks simultaneously.
02:17 And what they actually do is assisting in some planned maneuvers,
02:21 like precisely maneuvering the truck under a crane or when there is an edge case.
02:27 We had a really random one in the last week where a seagull was stopping
02:32 in front of the truck and our truck is always programmed to not hit
02:35 any obstacle, right?
02:37 And therefore it stopped, then it called the remote operator
02:40 sitting in that office for assistance.
02:42 The operator connected with that vehicle, saw it's just a seagull,
02:46 continue your mission vehicle and the vehicle continues its mission.
02:51 And thereby we achieve this productivity gain of one-to-four-one operator
02:55 controlling four trucks.
02:57 Interesting. I know you said it's in a controlled location.
03:00 Is there ever a future in which you want to bring these out onto the roads?
03:04 Yeah, so this is really step one of our journey.
03:08 So we want to start where it's feasible today,
03:10 where we can create value for our customers and then grow with that
03:14 same customer base and with the same technology in more complex environments.
03:18 For example, going into like the five kilometer routes around the sites
03:23 where you connect highly repetitive routes between the port and warehouses.
03:27 And yeah, this is step two of our journey.
03:30 And when we are allowed to really think big and achieving our vision
03:34 is that we automate the physical world.
03:36 So bringing automation wherever humans and machines can work
03:41 hand in hand together.
03:43 Now talk to me about the founding story. How did this all come about?
03:46 Yeah, so Max, Michael and me, we met at university and both of them
03:51 have PhDs in the autonomous driving space.
03:55 And we decided in 2019 that we spin off the technology
03:58 from the Technical University of Munich.
04:01 So we had already one cornerstone locked in that we use this kind of technology.
04:05 And the second cornerstone was that we were very aligned of
04:08 what kind of company we want to build.
04:10 So we believe that there's an opportunity to build a generational technology company
04:14 from Europe based on autonomous driving.
04:16 So the open question was, hey, what kind of industry do we tackle?
04:20 And then in 2020, the COVID times hit every one of us
04:26 and we experienced what it means when supply chains are broken.
04:30 So we spent some time with trucking customers, logistics industry.
04:34 And yeah, we decided let's overcome those shortages of the trucking industry.
04:39 It's really, really huge. It's the backbone of everything.
04:42 But it's poised for disruption through autonomous driving and electrification.
04:46 That's what we're doing now.
04:48 Very cool. Now I'm curious about the safety aspects and any legality you face of this.
04:55 How do you navigate the safety space and also legal barriers that you may face?
05:00 Yeah. So on the regulatory question, is it legal to take out the driver
05:05 out of a cabin in this kind of environment? Yes.
05:08 So it's private ground. This is one of the reasons why we decided for this use case
05:12 where we start today on private geofence areas,
05:15 since you don't need to change any legislation.
05:17 So that's one of the reasons. But also when you have an environment
05:22 where you're not driving that fast, also what could go wrong is way more controlled
05:28 and can be tackled with technology that is feasible today.
05:32 And you don't need to solve unsolved science problems that are maybe unsolved
05:36 for some use cases on the open roads where you're driving 80 kilometers per hour,
05:40 need to see very, very fine to the future and even predict what everyone is doing around you.
05:45 This is what we don't need for solving the challenges we have today for our customers.
05:50 And speaking of customers, who are they? How many do you have?
05:54 And what locations are you operating in?
05:56 Yeah. So we started three years ago when we brought the technology from the university
06:02 into the trucking industry within geofence areas.
06:06 And they're basically three kinds of use cases on distribution centers
06:09 where you move trailers around warehouses. This is for DB Schenker, for example.
06:13 Then we are moving cargo on big production facilities for Volkswagen, for example,
06:19 and then containers on seaports. And this is what we do for the port of Hamburg.
06:24 Very cool. Tell me about your fundraising journey
06:27 and what having this amount of capital has afforded you.
06:30 Yeah. So we are a deep tech company, so we need a lot of funding to make this a reality.
06:36 And we raised already our very first round directly when we founded the company.
06:40 So we founded the company in 2019 in September.
06:43 And even before actually founding the company, we had the first term sheets on the table from VCs.
06:48 And this money allows us then to bring the technology out of the lab into the real world
06:54 and over the last years finding product market fit.
06:57 So really serving customers in a scalable way and now making this a reality takes some money.
07:03 It's not taking that money that those AV companies were raising billions,
07:08 but we raised 50 million in our Series A last year and we will continue to raise money
07:13 to build a generation of technology from Europe.
07:16 That's awesome. I think autonomous vehicles is a really popular space to be in right now.
07:22 How do you set yourself apart from all the other companies out there doing very similar things that you are?
07:27 Yeah, it comes down to our approach.
07:29 So we started the company based on the hypothesis that you should not tackle this in a moonshot approach.
07:36 So some companies directly went for the most difficult use cases in the most difficult environments,
07:41 like robo-taxis in urban traffic or trucking at high speeds.
07:45 This is a really hard problem to solve.
07:48 Why not solving a problem that you can address today with technology that works today?
07:52 And this is what we then applied in the yard space.
07:55 And the second thing that is very controversial, even more controversial five years ago,
08:01 was that we don't believe in full autonomy.
08:03 So we believe in this human assisted way where we have a lot of autonomy, 80%, 90%, maybe 95%,
08:11 but keeping this human in the loop allows us what is most important for our customers in logistics
08:17 to guarantee 100% reliability from day one.
08:20 And this is then also key for scaling since a customer that is ordering 100 trucks
08:25 and they are not reliable would be a mess for the entire supply chain.
08:29 Absolutely. So going off that, how exactly are you using AI right now in your tech?
08:34 Yeah, so for those 80%, 90% autonomous features,
08:39 you can basically use a very simple deterministic approach when it comes to autonomous driving.
08:46 So this is step one on the technology journey.
08:49 But as we are collecting a lot of data in real life operations every single day in paid customer operations,
08:57 we can collect the data and then apply machine learning to solve also the last 5, 6, 7, 8, 9%.
09:04 We will never solve the last percent since you think it's important to keep the human in the loop
09:10 and build this fallback layer with the human.
09:15 But this is where we apply AI, for example.
09:18 We also apply it in other parts of the tech stack.
09:20 For example, when you imagine connecting the vehicle that is operating on a yard with an office,
09:27 you need very good internet connectivity.
09:30 And we have a lot of AI in making sure that this connection is super reliable,
09:34 even without the need to have 5G.
09:37 What would it take for you to sell your company and is that your end goal?
09:42 I started the company with this clear vision of building a generational technology company.
09:48 When we now sell after chapter one or chapter two of the story,
09:53 this would not feel like the right thing to do.
09:55 I really want to do this for the next 20, 30 years.
09:58 After solving autonomous driving for trucks in yards and then bringing it to the open roads,
10:04 there are so many more challenges that our society has with the labor shortages
10:10 that can be overcome with this kind of technology.
10:13 What we want to do is redefine the role of humans in a fully automated way.
10:18 Is there one piece of advice that you would give your younger self
10:22 the day before you started your company that you wish you knew now?
10:25 I think what's really important, especially when you're a young founder,
10:30 is that you build a skill to trust your intuition.
10:33 I think I would give this advice to my younger self to do this even earlier and more
10:42 without the need to get a lot of data for every decision since then you can move way faster
10:47 and not waiting too long for some decisions that might be difficult,
10:54 but where you had already the right answer and the right decision very early on in the decision process.
10:59 That's a great answer. And final question for you.
11:02 What would you like your legacy to be?
11:04 Wow. I have not thought about this.
11:09 I think a lot about what is important in the next 24 months to deliver on the customer contracts we have
11:18 and make them really, really happy and also giving our team the resources
11:22 when they need to succeed and really empower everyone on this journey to get closer
11:27 to the end goal of building a company that can automate the physical world.
11:33 Excellent. Well, Hendrik, thank you so much for sharing this with me. I really appreciate it.
11:36 Thank you very much.
11:37 Thank you.
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