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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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AutoX Drives off with $100M in Funding to Expand its Autonomous Vehicle Fleet

Self-driving vehicle company AutoX closed a $100M Series A funding round earlier this week, reports KrAsia. This round was led by state-owned Chinese car company Dongfeng Motor, with participation from Alibaba, Silicon Valley’s Plug and Play China fund and Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation. This brings the total amount raised by AutoX to $160.1 million.

In addition to building an autonomous driving platform that can be integrated into standard vehicles, the company launched a unique grocery delivery + mobile commerce pilot in San Jose, CA in August last year. While the service allows users to order groceries through the AutoX app on their phone, the delivery vehicle itself is also stocked with items that can be purchased on the spot.

In January of this year, we reported on how AutoX was quietly expanding into more restaurant delivery. Delivering meals allowed for more stops per trip, and helped avoid one of the drawbacks of self-driving grocery delivery–the fact that groceries can be heavy and consumers still need to lug them from the curb to the house or up apartment stairs.

Unlike Nuro or RoboMart which make small, low-speed pod-like vehicles, AutoX is intentionally sticking with full-sized autonomous driving. The company believes the longer distances and faster driving capabilities of full sized cars make them more useful here in the U.S.. Additionally, unlike those self-driving rivals, AutoX is not making its own car and is instead focusing only on the self-driving technology, which can then be applied to different car types like sedans and minivans.

AutoX plans to use its new money to build out its autonomous fleet and hiring up its technical team.

Here’s The Spoon’s 2019 Food Robotics Market Map

Today we head to San Francisco for The Spoon’s first-ever food-robotics event. ArticulAte kicks off at 9:05 a.m. sharp at the General Assembly venue in SF, and throughout the daylong event talk will be about all things robots, from the technology itself to business and regulatory issues surrounding it.

When you stop and look around the food industry, whether it’s new restaurants embracing automation or companies changing the way we get our groceries, it’s easy to see why the food robotics market is projected to be a $3.1 billion market by 2025.

But there’s no one way to make a robot, and so to give you a sense of who’s who in this space, and to celebrate the start of ArticulAte, The Spoon’s editors put together this market map of the food robotics landscape.

This is the first edition of this map, which we’ll improve and build upon as the market changes and grows. If you have any suggestions for other companies or see ones we missed you think should be in there, let us know by leaving a comment below or emailing us at tips@thespoon.tech.

Click on the map below to enlarge it.

The Food Robotics Market 2019:

AutoX Eyes Expanded Restaurant Delivery for its Self-Driving Cars

AutoX, the startup that made a splash last year with its self-driving grocery delivery + mobile-commerce solution, expanded into the hot food delivery space, and is now working with 14 restaurants in the San Jose area.

When it launched its first pilot, AutoX caught our eye because the company wasn’t just making straight grocery deliveries. It also outfitted its self-driving cars with li’l mini-marts in the backseat of the vehicles, so people could make additional purchases on the spot.

AutoX quietly expanded into restaurant delivery about a month ago, and at the recent CES show in Las Vegas, its autonomous cars delivered food from Applebee’s to hungry press and attendees. According to Li, one of the reasons AutoX likes restaurant delivery is that it can easily make multiple deliveries, reducing the amount of time the car spends empty.

Autonomous car delivers burgers at CES

Another reason hot food is appealing is that when a driverless car arrives with your groceries, there is no driver to help you carry them in. Hauling heavy bags of groceries could be a problem for older people or those living many flights of stairs up. You don’t exactly have to lug a burger and fries.

That’s not to say AutoX is abandoning its grocery roots. Far from it. Li says that they will just adapt their platform accordingly. “We’re exploring how to better use our technology,” said Li, “Maybe we don’t deliver to apartment buildings for groceries, or we do some kind of reward for coming downstairs.”

Additionally, the company is bringing its self-driving technology to minivans, which would allow it to make multiple grocery deliveries along one route.

There is increased competition for AutoX, however, on all sides and in its own back yard. On the restaurant front, DoorDash recently started testing self-driving car deliveries in San Francisco. For groceries, Udelv uses autonomous delivery vans to deliver food from Farmstead. And elsewhere in the Bay Area, Robomart just announced a self-driving mobile commerce partnership with Stop & Shop.

AutoX, however, may wind up partnering with some of its competition down the road. Right now the AutoX app serves as the marketplace for users to place restaurant orders, but eventually, Li said, the company’s self-driving fleet could be a delivery option for customers on a different platform like Uber Eats or DoorDash.

AutoX is part of a larger automation trend disrupting and transforming the food industry. If you’re interested in how self-driving technology and other food robotics will shape the meal journey, be sure to attend out Articulate summit in San Francisco on April 16!.

CES 2019: Robby and Robomart are Bringing Mobile Commerce to the Masses

“We are like Boeing.” This exact sentence was said to me in separate, back-to-back meetings at CES with Robby and Robomart. Both are autonomous vehicle companies, both are at the forefront of the emerging mobile commerce trend, and both want to be like the storied jet maker (more on that in a minute).

We write a lot about the rise of delivery, whether it’s by human, drone, self-driving car or robot. But a straight-up delivery business is different from mobile commerce. Delivery is a one-to-one transaction. You order something, a restaurant or store puts that item in some kind of vehicle that travels to your door, drops it off and then at some point travels back to a central hub empty.

Mobile commerce, on the other hand, puts the store on the road. When an order is placed, the item still arrives, but it comes with a (small) store. This model is appealing for a few reasons. First, there is no down time for the delivery vehicles. They don’t have to travel back to a central hub and refill before making another delivery, so the vehicles are generally always in use.

Additionally, mobile commerce can encourage additional purchases. You may be a student at the University of the Pacific who just ordered a Pepsi by robot, but once it arrives, the container also holds snacks that may you want to impulse buy.

Finally, this store on the go also gives the retailer more data that is closer to the point of use. If you buy a Pepsi at the store, the store has no idea when you will drink it or what you’ll do with it. But if you order a Pepsi to be delivered to you at the library, or buy one from a mobile store outside your home, chances are good that you’ll consume it pretty soon thereafter. It’s not a perfect science, but it provides more data about consumer behavior for retailers and CPG brands.

But let’s get back to Boeing.

The reason both Robby and Robomart likened themselves to Boeing is because they are in the vehicle platform biz. They don’t really care what you want to sell or where you want to sell it, they just want to be the way you get it there. And the two companies are taking very different-sized approaches.

Robby builds small, autonomous rover robots on wheels. It leases the robots and software to brands who want to form a more direct sales channels with their consumers. In the case of Pepsi, the Robby bot has been outfitted with a cold side (using cold packs, not compressors) to keep sodas chilled and a side with no temp control for snacks like chips and snack bars. When an item is ordered, Robby delivers it, and if the consumer takes more stuff out, on-board computer vision keeps track of its inventory and charges that person accordingly.

Robby goes 20 miles on a charge and has a swappable battery, so it doesn’t have to be taken offline to charge.

Robomart, on the other hand, is thinking bigger. Robomart made a splash at CES 2018, and has been busy ever since. The company builds self-driving vehicles that are low-speed and smaller than a car (similar to a Nuro pod). They are refrigerated and can be customized to fit particular retail needs. The company says it has signed a deal with an East Coast grocer in the U.S. for a delivery pilot.

The Robomart holds more than Robby, obviously, and uses RFID tags to keep track of inventory and charge people. Robomart says this is because it will be carrying a lot of produce, and computer vision doesn’t work as well with fruits and vegetables. Robomart has a 55-mile range and travels at less than 25 mph. To appease regulators, even though Robomart is autonomous, it will at first be driven remotely by a teleoperator. Its business model also includes leasing vehicles and software to customers.

AutoX is similar to Robby and Robomart, but is taking a more hybrid approach. AutoX has regular self-driving sedans to make grocery deliveries, but it also keeps additional inventory in the backseat of the car in case the consumer wants to buy more.

Even the bigger players are getting involved in mobile commerce. Panasonic showed off its concept SPACe-Ce Mart mobile store at CES this year, and Toyota formed a joint venture with Softbank for a mobile platform that would include stores on the go.

Mobile commerce is poised to be huge, and while it may not go mainstream this year, with all this investment and activity, it looks like 2019 will be the year mobile commerce starts to get off the ground.

AutoX Accelerates Autonomous Grocery Delivery with New California Pilot Program

Self-driving car startup AutoX announced today that it launched its first pilot of autonomous grocery delivery in San Jose, CA (h/t TechCrunch). AutoX’s move follows Kroger’s self-driving grocery delivery pilot launch in Phoenix earlier this month, signaling that autonomous grocery delivery might be commonplace before we know it.

For its San Jose pilot, AutoX partnered with fellow Bay Area companies GrubMarket, which is a B2B supplier of produce, and DeMartini Orchard, a Los Altos-based produce market. For now, AutoX’s grocery delivery is open to customers in geo-fenced areas of San Jose, and will be gradually expanding “every few weeks.”

What makes AutoX’s delivery program a little different from other grocery home delivery coming to market is that you can order groceries for delivery ahead of time and purchase items that are stocked inside the car. That is: you can place an advance order for groceries through the AutoX app for next-day delivery, or you can have the car come to your house where you can choose from a selection of goods that are inside the car and pay for them on the spot. The specifics of payment for in-car goods, such as whether cars are equipped with Amazon Go-like functionality or use some system of sensors, is unclear from the reporting.

Image via Auto X

Additionally, it looks as though AutoX’s deliveries will truly be human-free. In the announcement blog post, AutoX wrote: “The groceries will be well-preserved in a temperature-controlled environment throughout their driverless ride over.” So there won’t be anyone to gripe at if your order’s wrong.

AutoX’s news comes on the same day that Toyota invested $500 million in Uber as part of a larger agreement between the two companies to work on driverless car technology. While that deal didn’t address food delivery via something like the fast-growing Uber Eats specifically, Toyota did unveil its “e-Palette” line of autonomous delivery vehicles at CES earlier this year. So this new investment could come with its own autonomous food delivery component.

The entire autonomous driving space is driving ahead so quickly that pretty soon I’m going to run out of car-related puns. As noted earlier, Kroger has started its self-driving grocer delivery pilot in Arizona. And elsewhere at CES this year, Ford announced a deal with Postmates for self-driving food delivery.

Founded in 2016, AutoX has offices in San Jose and China, and according to TechCrunch, the company has raised $43 million from strategic investors. If you’re in the right area in San Jose, snap and share with us a pic of the robot car. Even better, order some groceries and let us know how it goes.