TL;DR: Autonomous vehicles are scaling fast, but the depots that charge, inspect, and operate them are still manual. RoboDock automates charging and vehicle inspections so fleets can finally be end-to-end autonomous.

https://youtu.be/hNc56Z1-Ojs

🚧 The problem

Autonomous vehicles are no longer the bottleneck. Infrastructure is.

By 2035, there will be ~76M autonomous vehicles globally, and the AV market is expected to grow from ~$200B today to ~$3T.

Yet the depots that power these fleets are still manually run. If you were to go watch one, you’d be shocked at how many people it takes to maintain the vehicles.

Today, AV and EV fleet depots rely on people to:

• Plug and unplug vehicles into chargers
• Catch missed or failed charge events
• Manually inspect vehicles before and after deployment
• Maintain road-readiness under tight turnaround times

This breaks the autonomy loop.

The pain these fleets experience?

• ~$900k per depot per year in charging labor and overhead
• Redundant chargers and vehicles to compensate for human error
• 2–3 year timelines and $8M+ CapEx just to build new depots
• Vehicle downtime from missed issues and reactive maintenance (up to $650k per depot per year) → less time making money on the road

Autonomous fleets can drive themselves, but they still can’t operate themselves.

✅ The solution

RoboDock is building autonomous depots for autonomous fleets.

We deploy a robotic system that:

• Physically plugs vehicles into chargers
• Verifies successful charge initiation
• Performs automated post-trip vehicle inspections every time a vehicle returns

Our system works with existing depots, existing chargers, and any vehicle type. No layout changes and no rebuilds necessary.

Charging and inspections become:

• Fully autonomous
• Safe and consistent
• Closed-loop and self-optimizing

We’re turning depots from manual cost centers into self-running infrastructure.

🧠 Why RoboDock

• Hardware-first autonomy: We automate the physical work that actually limits fleet scale
• Robotic charging: No humans, no missed plugs, no idle vehicles
• Safety-first inspections: Vision + thermal sensing catch issues humans can’t see consistently
• Retrofit, not rebuild: Deploy into live depots with zero operational disruption
• Designed for scale: Every vehicle, every return, every day improves the system

This is how autonomy actually becomes autonomous.

👩🏾‍🔧👩🏻‍💻 Our team

We’ve spent our engineering careers building real-world autonomy. We met seven years ago at Stanford, when Zinny was Celine’s TA.

Zinny Weli — CEO & Co-Founder

Led design and deployment of autonomous charging systems for electric drones at Zipline, and designed the charging system for Amazon's first home robot and its advanced robotics manipulation platform.

Celine Wang — CTO & Co-Founder

Former vehicle platform engineer at Plus, where she retrofitted autonomous systems onto semi-truck fleets by integrating mechanical, electrical, and software stacks end-to-end.

Together, we bring deep experience deploying autonomy where it actually breaks: the real world.

🙏 Our ask

We’re onboarding early pilot partners and would love introductions to:

• AV & EV fleet operators
• Infrastructure, parking, and depot operations team
• Ports, logistics yards, and large fleet facilities
• Hardware and systems minded investors thinking about autonomy at scale
• Robotics/computer vision engineers

If you’re thinking about how fleets operate, we should talk! Email zinny@robodock.tech or celine@robodock.tech.