Alex Rodrigues is the co-founder and CEO of Embark Trucks, a self-driving truck company based in San Francisco, CA. Alex founded Embark in 2016 to improve the safety, efficiency, and cost of moving goods by building self-driving software for trucks. Growing up in Canada, Alex started building robots at age 11. As a middle schooler, he won a world robotics championship competing against high school teams. While studying at the University of Waterloo, Alex and co-founder Brandon Moak built Canada’s first self-driving vehicle, a golf cart named “Marvin” that was used to take guests on tours of the campus. Alex is a Thiel Fellowship recipient and was accepted into Silicon Valley’s premier startup incubator Y-Combinator, where he launched Embark. In November 2021, Embark became a publicly traded company, listing on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “EMBK.”
Through this process, Alex also became the youngest CEO of a publicly traded company. Under his leadership, the company has achieved a number of industry firsts as it commercializes autonomous freight: Embark was the first self-driving truck company to achieve an autonomous coast-to-coast drive, the first to reach 100,000 miles driven on public roads, and the first to open a network of transfer points. Today, the company partners with some of the largest shippers and carriers in the nation, collectively representing over 35,000 trucks, as it commercializes the software to power autonomous trucks.
