TUSIMPLE

TuSimple was founded in 2015 by Mo Chen and Xiaodi Hou. The bet was simple and huge.

Long-haul trucking is exhausting, dangerous, and short of drivers. If you could teach a truck to drive itself down the highway, you could move freight cheaper and safer around the clock.

The company built self-driving systems and tested them on real routes in the American Southwest, hauling actual cargo between Arizona and Texas. For a while it looked like the clear leader in a brand-new industry.

The plan was to sell autonomous driving for trucks. TuSimple did not want to own a giant fleet.

It wanted to build the self-driving brain, the cameras, sensors, and software, and put it into trucks built by partners like Navistar. Freight companies would pay to move goods on TuSimple-powered trucks that could run longer hours than a human driver legally can.

Less fuel. Fewer accidents.

No driver fatigue. That was the pitch to investors and shippers alike.

The core product was TuSimple's autonomous driving system for Class 8 long-haul trucks, a stack of cameras, radar, lidar, and software that could see far down the highway and drive without a person. It also built the Autonomous Freight Network, a set of mapped lanes and terminals designed for driverless trucks to run between.

After the pivot, the company moved toward AI-generated gaming and animation under CreateAI.

TuSimple grew by lining up the whole supply chain early. It partnered with truck maker Navistar to build purpose-built autonomous trucks.

It signed deals with shippers and logistics names and built an Autonomous Freight Network of mapped routes. Big backers like Nvidia, UPS, and Goodyear's venture arm piled in.

The 2021 Nasdaq IPO raised around $1 billion and gave it the cash and the credibility to look like the front-runner in driverless trucking.

Almost everything went wrong at once. Self-driving trucks turned out to be far harder and slower to deploy than promised.

Then the company got tangled in US-China tensions. In October 2022 the board fired CEO and co-founder Xiaodi Hou, citing concerns he had shared confidential information with a Chinese startup called Hydron.

US regulators scrutinized its China ties. The stock, which peaked near $63 in 2021, fell to around 44 cents.

In early 2024 TuSimple voluntarily delisted from the Nasdaq, pulled out of the US, and shifted to China and Japan, eventually rebranding around AI and video games as CreateAI.

TuSimple drew a serious roster of backers. Chipmaker Nvidia was an early investor and supplier.

Logistics giant UPS, tiremaker Goodyear's venture arm, Chinese internet group Sina, and truck maker Navistar all put money in. The 2021 IPO brought in around $1 billion from public investors at an $8.5 billion valuation.

The same investors then watched most of that value evaporate in under three years.