The Future of Logistics Is Electric, Autonomous and Superlight
By Gemma Shepherd, Max Blanshard, and Rahul Parekh
Road freight is one of the largest industrial markets in the world and one of the most traditional.
The global truck market is worth roughly $400bn today and is expected to grow to more than $900bn by 2035. Commercial vehicles form the physical backbone of the global economy: moving goods from ports to warehouses, between distribution centres, and onto retailers, businesses and homes.
And yet the vehicle itself has barely changed.
Most middle mile and long haul commercial vehicles are still built around an architecture designed for diesel: a large central engine, a heavy steel chassis and mechanical drivetrain components optimised over decades for internal combustion.
We believe Noamaan and Superlight are changing that.
Superlight are not trying to make an old diesel vehicle electric. They are rebuilding the commercial vehicle from first principles for the age of electrification, autonomy and software-defined manufacturing. By applying principles from aerospace engineering, clean-sheet vehicle design and digital manufacturing, Superlight are going to reinvent one of the most important industrial products in the world.
That is why we are thrilled to be co-leading Superlight’s Series A along with our friends at Engine Ventures.
Why this time is different
Electric trucks have humbled many ambitious startups over the last few years. These struggles made us cautious but also clarified the problem. Many companies tried to add batteries to legacy vehicle architectures, replicated capital intensive manufacturing models, or focused on sustainability at the expense of unit economics.
Noamaan, his brother Sheban, and the Superlight team have taken a different approach.
They started with physics, customer operations and the manufacturing system. They asked what a commercial vehicle should look like if it were designed from scratch for electric propulsion, digital control, autonomous readiness and software-led manufacturing.
That first-principles thinking is visible throughout Superlight’s first vehicle, the OV-1.
The result is a 7.5-tonne vehicle with the cargo volume of a much larger truck. The OV-1 can carry 50–100% more pallets than any 7.5-tonne ICE or EV competitor, while remaining light enough to avoid many of the licensing requirements and city-centre or residential restrictions that constrain larger heavy goods vehicles.
That matters because in middle-mile logistics, many operators run out of space before they run out of weight. Fleet customers do not necessarily need a heavier vehicle; they need more usable volume, dock-height loading, fast turnaround and lower cost per delivered unit.
The OV-1 is built for that reality.
Better economics and better technology
For a new commercial vehicle platform to matter, it has to win on economics.
We conducted our own independent total cost of ownership analysis across competing diesel and electric vehicles. The results were striking.
The OV-1 is cost-competitive with comparable diesel vehicles, materially cheaper to operate and capable of charging in under an hour. A built-in range extender provides up to 800 km of total range, allowing customers to adopt electric vehicles without waiting for charging infrastructure to be perfect.
The most important metric is not simply purchase price, range or cost per kilometre. It is cost per pallet-kilometre.
On that basis, the OV-1 delivers a superior total cost of ownership to every competitor we analysed. For customers operating on thin logistics margins this really makes a difference.
A platform for autonomous freight
One of the reasons we believe Superlight can succeed where others failed is that the team is not only redesigning the vehicle. It is redesigning the manufacturing system around it.
Because the OV-1 was designed from scratch, so was the factory. Every vehicle rolls off the line fully instrumented with sensors and software, feeding real-time data back to Superlight’s AI-powered digital twin of the production floor, built in partnership with Google Cloud.
Rather than a cosmetic software layer added to a traditional industrial process, it is a software-led manufacturing system designed to connect product design, production, vehicle performance and maintenance into one feedback loop.
That feedback loop should allow Superlight to iterate faster, identify production issues earlier, improve reliability, support predictive maintenance and build a data advantage that compounds with every vehicle produced.
It also creates the foundation for increasingly autonomous operation over time.
Autonomous freight is often discussed as though it is purely a software problem. We think that is too narrow. The long-term winners will need the right vehicle platform, sensor layer, drivetrain, maintenance model, manufacturing data and fleet operating system.
A vehicle built for autonomy should not be a legacy diesel platform with electric components and sensors added on top. It should be designed from day one to be instrumented, software-defined, data-rich and operationally efficient.
That is what Superlight is building.
Our conviction
Ultimately, our conviction in Superlight started with the founders.
Noamaan and Sheban Siddiqi are exactly the kind of founders we look for at 2150: ambitious enough to rethink a global industrial category, but pragmatic enough to build the first products, win the first customers and prove the hard parts before raising significant institutional capital.
Noamaan is a rare technical founder, combining deep automotive, aerospace and electrical engineering expertise with a first-principles approach to product design. Sheban brings the commercial, operational and execution muscle around him.
Together, the brothers have built a team capable of operating across vehicle engineering, software, manufacturing, supply chain and customer development, a combination that is exceptionally difficult to assemble.
Better, cheaper and greener
At 2150, we believe the most important sustainability companies will not be those that ask customers to compromise. They will be the companies that make the sustainable choice the economically superior choice.
That is what makes Superlight so compelling. The company is addressing one of the largest commercial vehicle markets in the world with a product that can be cheaper to buy, cheaper to run, better suited to customer operations and materially lower-emission.
Noamaan, Sheban and the Superlight team are not just electrifying the commercial vehicle. They are reinventing it.
We could not be more excited to partner with them as they build the future of logistics and are delighted to be co-leading Superlight’s oversubscribed £15m Series A alongside Engine Ventures, with support from Patty Wexler at Avila VC.
2150 is a venture capital firm backing the founders building transformational technologies across energy, industry, materials, and the built environment. Our mission is to provide foundational capital to transform our physical world. For returns and for good. Managing €500m from London and Copenhagen, 2150 invests across Europe and North America.
www.2150.vc
