ISEE, a Cambridge, Mass.-based developer of autonomous yard trucks, announced a strategic partnership with Holman on Friday. Holman, which is also an investor in ISEE, will lease, retrofit and maintain the trucks that run ISEE’s autonomy system in North America.
Customers can put ISEE’s system on trucks they already own, on trucks leased from Holman or on autonomous-ready vehicles supplied by ISEE. Trucks will be retrofitted and integrated before delivery, with Holman’s financing and fleet management services behind them, according to ISEE’s announcement.
Debbie Yu, president and co-founder of ISEE, said customers don’t always have a fleet ready to automate.
“First of all, you have to figure out where to get the truck. Either buy it, or lease it, or rent it,” Yu said in an interview with FreightWaves. “Then we have to retrofit the truck with our autonomy kit, deploy to the customer site, do the maintenance, and run the yard.”
Most of that list involves no software at all.
Doing retrofits in-house would have meant hiring many more technicians, work Yu said falls outside ISEE’s expertise. Holman has done truck retrofitting for years and runs a nationwide network of shops and technicians alongside its leasing business, she said.
Holman launched Holman Robotics, a unit that pairs financing with lifecycle management for robotic equipment, in December 2025.
“By combining Holman’s robot fleet leasing and management infrastructure with ISEE’s autonomous technology, we can provide customers with a practical solution covering the full vehicle lifecycle,” said Joe Foster, Holman’s vice president of robotics, in a statement.
From pilots to fleets
ISEE did not need a large fleet or much retrofit capacity while it was running prototypes and pilots, Yu said. She described the company as now at an inflection point, with multiple F100 customers interested in deploying over thousands autonomous yard truck fleets with ISEE over the next couple of years.
Retrofits and factory builds
Retrofits cover trucks already in service. New units come through OEMs, including terminal tractor maker TICO, which partnered with ISEE in April 2025.
“Not just retrofitting. We also need to do factory-built units through the TICO collaboration, starting from 2027,” Yu said.
That timing matches the 2027 serial production target FreightWaves reported in June. ISEE will also keep working with other yard truck OEMs on new diesel, alternative-fuel and electric models, according to the release.
Yu said retrofits let operators of yard trucks already working in customer yards automate sooner.
Demand is rising as manufacturing, data centers and infrastructure grow in the United States, Yu said, including from enterprise customers “that we never imagined before.”
“We believe it’s critical to actually align the partnership quickly,” she said.
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