The View from the Office.

I met up with Heidi Wyle, founder and CEO of Venti Technologies, at the Bryant Park Cafe. We started with guac and chips. I had the quinoa salad. She had a turkey burger.

Venti builds autonomous trucks that move shipping containers inside enclosed logistics environments including ports, rail yards, airports, factories and warehouses. The trucks never touch public roads, which distinguishes the tech and business from self-driving cars.

It’s a big opportunity. About $55 billion of goods move across the United States every day, and Heidi cites estimates of hundreds of billions of dollars lost each year to inefficiencies as containers transfer between ships, trains and trucks.

Venti and its customers believe autonomous trucks will create a new moving goods paradigm that will save customers 40% to 65% of shipping costs and billions of dollars.

Venti was founded in 2018 by a team with roots at MIT. Co-founders include Daniela Rus, professor at MIT and Director of CSAIL, the university’s largest lab, and Xinxin Du, Venti’s CSO. Rus spent a year at MIT’s Singapore program, and her relationships there helped recruit an experienced team.

Customers include two of the top US intermodal railroads and PSA, the world’s second largest port operator with 77 ports. Venti’s trucks have been running 24 hours a day in the Singapore port, the world’s second-largest container port, for two and a half years, with about 30 vehicles in operation.

The company aims to sign long-term agreements with other ports, warehouses, airports, and railroads to bring autonomous container trucks to intermodal and supply chain terminals across the U.S.

Heidi draws a clear line between her business and robotaxis. She says moving people at highway speeds on public roads is a different mathematical problem. Venti operates trucks at yard speeds but must navigate cranes, trains, forklifts and human-driven vehicles in dense industrial environments.

She said the hardest part of the business has been getting autonomous trucks to run safely, reliably and productively in live operations, around the clock. It took five years.

Heidi grew up with immigrant parents and earned a PhD from MIT and an MBA from Harvard Business School. She sold a previous startup she founded with two faculty members.

Venti has 110 full-time employees across the U.S. and Singapore. Heidi said she interviews every new hire personally and shakes their hands.  Her goal is to hire the “best of the best,” down to the janitor. She judges candidates on professional excellence and character.

She cited Harvard Business School research that says corporate culture is set by the person at the top which is why she said she takes monthly global team meetings seriously. Every employee gets equity. 

You can connect with Heidi via LinkedIn or DM me for a warm intro.