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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Food Robots Everywhere: Starship Hits Fifty Schools While Yo-Kai Aims for All Fifty States

Just in the last day, two food robot startups have shared some deployment data that make clear they – and the broader space – appear to be getting some traction.

First was the CEO of Yo-Kai, Andy Lin, who shared a map of the American cities in which Yo-Kai ramen kiosks are deployed:

When I followed up with a question about exactly how many locations and cities, Lin told me, “26 states, 127 locations.” He also said the company hopes to have Yo-Kais in all fifty states soon.

Impressive momentum, and it doesn’t even include the company’s presence in Asia and Europe.

Next up was Starship, which put out a news release this morning with updated college campus rollout numbers. According to the company, Starship sidewalk bots will traverse the campuses of 50 universities this fall – 20 more than last fall – including new schools like Wichita State University, Boise State University, and The University of New Orleans. The company says it now has a fleet of over two thousand sidewalk rovers and operates in over half of the US states.

The company also announced it is introducing wireless charging this year, which will allow the Starship bots to roll up to charging stations, connect, and charge, all without a human, using the same basic technology many of us use to charge our smart watches or iPhones with nowadays.

You can see the Starship charging stations in the video below:

Interestingly, the Starship numbers dwarf publicly available numbers from Serve, the spinout from Uber that said in its filing to go public via reverse merger that it currently has a fleet of about 100 sidewalk delivery bots.

While the past year has been a challenging one for food robots, the recent updates from Yo-Kai and Starship and Serve’s recent filing to go public show there is some hope for the market despite the difficulties of running complex and capital-intensive food robotics businesses.

Sidewalk Delivery Startup Serve Robotics To Go Public via Reverse Merger

Serve Robotics, the sidewalk delivery robot startup that began life as a research project within Postmates called X, is going public via reverse merger, The Spoon has learned. The news, first reported in Techcrunch, marks one of the first exits for a food automation startup and the first known exit for a sidewalk delivery automation startup.

According to Techcrunch, Serve is going public via a reverse merger with blank check company Patricia Acquisition Corp. Ahead of the reverse merger, which was completed earlier this month according to filings with the SEC, raised $30 million from existing Uber, Nvidia, and Wavemaker Partners.

The news is a rare bright spot in a tough stretch for food automation startups. Companies shutting down or laying off employees has become commonplace over the past 12 months as venture capital funding dries up, with hard-tech sectors like robotics getting hit especially hard. Basil Street Pizza, Pazzi, Chowbotics, and Creator have called it quits over the past year, while others like Picnic have had to lay off employees as they struggle to raise additional capital.

The journey from a skunkworks project to a publicly traded company has been quite the journey for Serve. Initially debuted in pretty much the same form factor as today’s big-eyed delivery bot in 2018, the Serve robot has gone from a Postmates project to a division within Uber to spinout to becoming a public company in the space of five years.

Company CEO Ali Kashani has been along for the entire ride, first serving as Postmates head of special projects in 2017 when Serve was first incubated within X, then serving as head of robotics at Uber, and later becoming CEO of the Uber spinout. And as of this month, Kashani is becoming CEO of a publicly traded company delivery automation startup.

Serve Robotics Strikes Deal With Uber to Scale Up to Two Thousand Sidewalk Delivery Robots

Uber Technologies Inc. is gearing up for a robotic future, bolstering its partnership with Serve Robotics Inc., a maker of sidewalk delivery robots. Following a successful trial in Los Angeles, the companies announced they would deploy up to 2,000 of Serve’s delivery robots in multiple markets across the United States. The deal marks one of the largest robotic delivery fleet deployments ever announced.

According to Serve, the expansion follows a year of strong growth, which saw the startup’s robotic deliveries grow 30% month over month since their introduction in 2022. Serve says that they currently serve over 200 Los Angeles restaurants.

“We are thrilled to be growing our partnership with Uber,” said Dr. Ali Kashani, co-founder and CEO of Serve Robotics. “This partnership is a major step towards mass commercialization of robotics for autonomous delivery, and it is a testament to the success of our partnership. We are excited to continue our work with Uber to bring this innovative technology to more cities across the country.”

For Serve, fleet expansion is made easier by the higher utilization of their robots in the field resulting from their fleets serving more than one customer in a given market. In the Los Angeles market, for example, the company’s fleet of about 100 robots delivers for both UberEats and 7-Eleven.

According to the company, they are eyeing San Jose, Dallas and Vancouver for possible expansion and have also started working with Pizza Hut in Vancouver and Walmart in Arkansas.

Long term, it will be interesting to see how cities begin to accommodate growing sidewalk robot traffic. Some cities have banned them, while others have begun to classify them as pedestrians.

Robot Delivery, Eh? Pizza Hut Canada Trials Serve Sidewalk Delivery Robot

This week Pizza Hut Canada announced they are partnering with sidewalk delivery robot startup Serve to run a two-week pilot program in Vancouver, B.C.

The trial will send the Serve robot to select customers’ doors when they place an order via the Pizza Hut app. Customers selected for the trial will be able to track the robot’s location via the app and will use a one-time pin to retrieve their order from the Pizza Hut-branded robot. You can see the robot navigating the streets of Vancouver in the video below.

Pizza delivery robots are being tested in B.C.

While various Pizza Hut franchise owners have dabbled in using robotics to make pizzas, this is the first time that we’ve seen the chain use a robotic delivery vehicle. The partnership also marks a first for Serve Robotics as it’s the first time the startup has deployed its delivery bot in Canada.

For now, the two companies are not giving any indication of whether this trial could extend beyond the initial trial. My guess is if things go well, we could see more Pizza Hut locations utilizing the Serve delivery-bot.

Chili’s is Trialing a Sidewalk Delivery Robot From Serve Robotics

Hankering for some Chili’s but don’t want to jump in your car? It might not be long before that grilled chicken and bowl of chili arrive at your front door via sidewalk robot.

That’s because Chili’s parent company Brinker has been secretly piloting a trial with sidewalk delivery startup Serve Robotics and is evaluating the possibility of a wider rollout.

The first hint of the Brinker-Serve pilot came via a small mention last week in an article in a Dallas publication about the company’s drone delivery trials with Flytrex. Both Brinker and Serve have since confirmed to The Spoon that they are running an early stage sidewalk delivery pilot but were not ready to discuss further details of a wider rollout.

“We can confirm Serve is working with Brinker International to roll out robotic delivery for Chili’s customers,” a Serve spokesperson told the Spoon. “We will have more to share once service is launched.”

Chili’s Serve pilot is just the latest move into robotics by the casual dining chain. Last October, robot servers named Rita from Bear Robotics started showing up across the country. And as mentioned previously, the company started testing out a Flytrex drone in North Texas.

As more restaurant revenue share comes via off-premise delivery, chains like Chili’s are exploring drone and sidewalk delivery to counter the high cost of traditional delivery from the likes of Uber and DoorDash. Wade Allen, Brinker’s SVP of innovation, told Dallas Innovates that drone delivery is “a lot cheaper” than solutions that involve a human and a car. Likewise, the cost economics of sidewalk delivery robots are also likely to be much lower than that of traditional delivery.

For Serve, which began life as a division of Postmates and spun out of Uber last year, Brinker represents a massive opportunity with over 1,600 Chili’s locations worldwide. The trial comes on the heels of last year’s seed round with strategic investors Uber, 7-Eleven, and Delivery Hero, all of which represent potentially interesting opportunities for the company.

The Food Robot Roundup: Zomato Invests in Mukunda, Ramen on Wheels

The last few weeks have been pretty eventful in the food robotics space. Here’s our latest food robot roundup to catch you up on some of the most interesting stories.

 Strio.AI Says Goodbye to Agtech With Zoox Acquihire

Strio.AI, a Boston-based robotics company founded by MIT alumnus in 2020, was acquired by Zoox, the robotaxi firm owned by Amazon. Strio.AI automates the picking and pruning strawberry crops and has been tested on farms in California and Florida.  

Automating fruit picking is challenging, which is why Strio.AI’s fast pace of testing is impressive. However, Zoox is looking to utilize Strio.AI’s expertise to bulk up its computer vision team, which means the Strio.AI team will be winding down its agtech business. The Strio team will lead Zoox’s Perception product, the computer vision software that drives Zoox’s automation. 

The Strio.AI deal is just the latest in a string of agtech automation acquisitions. Last month, strawberry-picking robot Traptic was acquired by Bowery, a New York based vertical farm, and pivoted from outdoor to indoor farming. Traptic was founded in 2016 and claims to pick 100,000 strawberries a day, preserving the fruit by pulling by the stem and not touching the strawberry directly. The technology will be adapted and integrated into Bowery’s existing hardware and software since the original tractor-like system isn’t conducive in a vertical farming environment. In April 2021, Root.ai, a company with a machine that picks grape tomatoes with a three-pronged robotic gripper, was acquired by AppHarvest, the operator of the largest greenhouse in the U.S. and now uses four- and eight-fingered grippers to pick strawberries and cucumbers. Since acquisition, picking rates have doubled and the next step is to reduce the costs of the robot.

NVIDIA Invests in Serve Robotics

NVIDIA is investing $10 million in Serve Robotics to expand its sidewalk robot delivery service outside of Los Angeles and San Francisco. While NVIDIA is a new investor in the robotic delivery space, the two companies are familiar with one another as Serve utilizes NVIDIA’s synthetic data generation tools for training and testing Serve’s models in simulations as well as robotic fleet management. 

Serve is a fully automated and fully self-driving last-mile delivery service and the startup raised $13 million in an expanded seed round in December. Last-mile delivery services, both on the ground and in the sky have seen significant growth in recent years as the pandemic increased delivery orders. As the sidewalks and streets get more crowded, here’s a table to help you understand the little robots you might be sharing the roads within the near future. 

Zomato Invests in Mukunda

Indian multinational food delivery company Zomato has acquired a 16.66% stake in Mukunda Foods, a food robotics company that designs and manufactures smart robotic equipment for restaurant automation. The stake comes with a price tag of $5 million. The deal puts Mukunda at $30 million valuation.

Mukunda Foods offers end-to-end kitchen automation solutions for QSR and Cloud brands and their six products have been installed in over 2000 locations. Their unique proposition is Nucleus, kitchen automation as a service (KAAS), which enables brands to expand cloud kitchens to new locations with a fully operational kitchen equipped with automated equipment, no rentals on property, no operational concerns, high consistency of products, and highly scalable profits. They’ve already partnered with several brands in Bangalore and plan to expand to other cities in India. 

There are a lot of opportunities for synergy since Mukunda Foods serves ghost kitchens and the ghost kitchens on Zomato have carved niches with loyal customer bases. There’s also a significant market opportunity since the Indian cloud kitchen market is projected to be between $2 and $2.8 billion USD by 2025. 

Ramen on wheels

In a commercial that debuted this month, Nissan showcased the e-4ORCE technology on its new Ariya by putting it on a self-driving car that delivers hot bowls of ramen to customers. The technology is designed to reduce abruptness and swaying for passenger comfort which is great for making sure that ramen soup doesn’t spill. On the Ramen Counter, the soup bowl sits on a flat tray and twin electric motors independently control the front and rear wheels. 

Unfortunately, it looks like this is more of a concept for advertising the Nissan Ariya and Nissan probably won’t make this available commercially but it’s cool to imagine a fresh bowl of ramen zooming down the counter to you. You can watch the video below.

 

Watch as Serve’s Sidewalk Robot Completes a Delivery With Level 4 Autonomy

This week, Serve Robotics announced that its sidewalk delivery robot can now complete deliveries at level 4 autonomy. According to the company, this makes their robot the first autonomous vehicle to complete commercial deliveries without the need for human assistance.

For those not familiar with autonomous driving parlance, level 4 autonomy means that Serve’s robot can now navigate a trip without the intervention of a human driver. However, as seen in the video below, at level 4, a human driver can choose to intervene to ensure an extra level of safety (as the Serve driver does at a crosswalk light).

Watch as Serve Delivery Robot Achieves Level 4 Autonomy

According to the announcement, this milestone is the result of a robot built with a highly redundant navigation system employing multiple cutting-edge technologies. The navigation system “includes multiple sensor modalities—active sensors such as lidar and ultrasonics, as well as passive sensors such as cameras—to navigate safely on busy city sidewalks. Serve Robotics’ achievement required development of a wide range of market-leading capabilities, such as automatic emergency braking, vehicle collision avoidance, and fail-safe mechanical braking.”

In the announcement, the company credits a couple of their technology partners in helping to reach this milestone. One of those companies is NVIDIA, whose Jetson platform provides the Serve robot with AI-computing to navigate complex unstructured environments. Serve also gave a shout-out to lidar-maker Ouster, which provides small and power-efficient lidar to help power Serve’s self-driving capabilities.

Up to this point, pretty much all autonomous sidewalk delivery robots employ the help of human drivers to navigate their routes. And even looking forward, even Serve and other bots move to level 4 autonomy, expect remote human drivers to continue to be in demand. That’s because there will always be potential unforeseen circumstances on different routes, and companies (like Serve) will want that extra layer of safety as their bots navigate through dense city environments.

However, with these types of advancements, human robot operators will be able to handle larger fleets over time. While some robot (and drone) delivery services already operate at a multiple-to-one ratio, higher autonomy means humans to robot ratios can increase, allowing pilots to handle more and more robots as they are deployed to the field.

Sidewalk Robot Specialist Serve Raises $13 Million From Uber, 7-Eleven & Wavemaker Labs

Serve Robotics, the autonomous sidewalk delivery robot spinout of Postmates (which itself was acquired by Uber), has announced a $13 million expanded seed round of funding. The new funding round includes several strategic investors, including former parent Uber Technologies, Delivery Hero backed DX Ventures,7-Eleven Inc.’s corporate venture arm, 7-Ventures, and Wavemaker Labs.

According to the release, Serve plans to use the new funding to accelerate its technology development and expand into new markets. The company, which has been trialing its delivery bot in the West Hollywood neighborhood, recently started to expand its executive ranks as it prepares to scale.

“This is a space that has kind of reached readiness for scale,” Serve CEO Ali Kashani told The Spoon in November. “So we are at a very pivotal point where we are no longer trying to develop something. We have developed something, and now we are putting it to use.”

For each of Serve’s new strategic investors, an alliance with the sidewalk robot company potentially adds another arrow to their automation quiver. For its part, 7-Eleven has been trialing autonomous automobile delivery with its partner Nuro in the California market, but has yet to partner up with a sidewalk robot partner. It will be interesting to watch if the company begins to trial with Serve in the California market in the coming months as it expands its efforts in autonomous delivery.

European delivery giant Delivery Hero had some early trials with sidewalk delivery startup Starship, but has since been relatively quiet on the sidewalk delivery front. However, the company’s head of special projects for its middle eastern delivery group, talabat, recently hinted that delivery robots and drones could become commonplace in the near future.

“I do see delivery robots being implemented quite soon, in specific scenarios,” said Maria Estevan, Head Of Special Projects at talabat, in a recent article on Delivery Hero’s website. “We can already see it at foodora, it’s already there. We just need to make it bigger, scalable, and adapted to the conditions of each country, its requirements, regulations, and culture. But to me, they are actually already here.”

For Wavemaker Labs, the company has largely been investing and incubating a lineup of different food robots ranging from its back-of-house frybot in Flippy from Miso, an autonomous pizza-making machine in Piestro, and its robotic kitchen robot in Nommi. With Serve, the food robotics-focused venture studio adds a food delivery robot to its portfolio of investments for the first time.

Postmates X Spun Out of Uber to Become Serve Robotics

Uber has officially spun out its Postmates X division to become its own standalone company now called Serve Robotics. The news was first reported by TechCrunch and confirms rumblings about such a move reported back in January.

Uber acquired Postmates for $2.65 billion last year, which included the Postmates X robotics unit. The Serve delivery robot is an autonomous cooler-sized rover robot currently making deliveries around the West Hollywood neighborhood of Los Angeles.

According to TechCrunch, Serve Robotics has raised an undisclosed seed round of funding led by the VC firm Neo, with participation from Uber, Lee Jacobs, Long Journey Ventures, Western Technology Investment and other investors. Serve Robotics will be led by Ali Kashani, who headed up Postmates X, will have 60 employees, and will be headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in Los Angeles, and Vancouver, Canada.

Delivery robots like Serve are definitely on the rise as a number of startups come to market around the world. In the U.S. Starship, Kiwibot and Refraction all have robots making deliveries. In Russia there’s Yandex, in South Korea there’s Woowa Brothers, and in Turkey there’s Delivers AI. (For more, check out our Delivery Robot Market Report available to our Spoon Plus members.)

With all these robotic solutions plus other autonomous vehicle options, Uber doesn’t need to have its own full-stack robotic delivery solution. As I wrote last month:

“…as Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi recently explained on Kara Swisher’s Sway podcast, his company is in the networking business. Khosrowshahi doesn’t think Uber needs to create the technology uses, it just needs access to the best technology that allows it to facilitate deliveries and ridesharing. That’s one reason Uber offloaded its autonomous driving unit at the end of last year.”

Additionally, spinning off Serve Robotics means that Uber itself does not need to devote resources to figuring out the patchwork of state, county and city laws when it comes to actually getting commercial autonomous delivery vehicles on public sidewalks and streets. The flip side of that however, is that dealing with this patchwork of regulations is something Serve will have to do on its own.

Report: Uber Looking to Spin Off Postmates X Delivery Robot Biz

As part of its acquisition of Postmates last year, Uber got into the delivery robot business. Now, according to a report in TechCrunch, Uber is planning to get out of the robo-biz by spinning off Postmates X (the robotics division of the company) into a separate company.

From TechCrunch:

Postmates X, the robotics division of the on-demand delivery startup that Uber acquired last year for $2.65 billion, is seeking investors in its bid to become a separate company, according to several people familiar with the plans.

The new spinout is being called Serve Robotics, named after the companies’ autonomous, cooler-sized Serve robot, which was making deliveries in Los Angeles throughout much of 2020. More recently, Postmates Serve was enlisted by the Pink Dot market to make deliveries in West Hollywood.

TechCrunch reports that Serve Robotics would retain the IP and assets, and Uber would keep a 25 percent stake in the company.

Given how the COVID-19 pandemic is pushing restaurants and grocers to adopt more contactless delivery methods, it may seem like an odd time for Uber to get out of the delivery robot business.

As we’ve been chronicling, autonomous delivery robots are popping up all over the globe. Starship has been doing deliveries on college campuses for more than a year, and expanded to grocery delivery in Modesto, CA. Kiwibot partnered with the City of San Jose for robot restaurant deliveries there. Then there’s Yandex in Russia, Delivers AI in Turkey, and Woowa Brothers in Seoul, South Korea.

But as Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi recently explained on Kara Swisher’s Sway podcast, his company is in the networking business. Khosrowshahi doesn’t think Uber needs to create the technology uses, it just needs access to the best technology that allows it to facilitate deliveries and ridesharing. That’s one reason Uber offloaded its autonomous driving unit at the end of last year.

While the use of robotics is definitely on the rise around the world, there are still a lot of hurdles to overcome before they become mainstream. Regulations and production scale are two biggies. Right now there are a patchwork of rules around autonomous delivery that vary from city to city and state to state. Even as those get ironed out, scaling robots to a number where we see them across the country is still a huge undertaking.

Uber pushing those issues off on to a separate company means Uber can focus more on its own delivery and ridesharing businesses. Uber can then just license the robot technology to facilitate its food delivery.

Pink Dot Using Postmates’ Serve Robot to Delivery Food in West Hollywood

Residents of the Los Angeles neighborhood of West Hollywood shouldn’t be surprised if they see bright pink robots zipping along its sidewalks soon. Local market Pink Dot is now using Postmates’ Serve bot to make food deliveries in that part of town.

WehoVille reports that Pink Dot started using the robots last Thursday and that it is the only business using robots for deliveries in that neighborhood. Customers ordering food from Pink Dot through Postmates will have the option of choosing either a human or a robot make the delivery. When the robot arrives at a home or building, the customer will get a text message saying its food is there along with a special code to unlock the robot to retrieve their order.

Pink Dot is using three robots (named Pinky, Dotty and Solly), and the whole program is currently a three-month test. A human will still escort robots out on deliveries to help with any problems that arise, but those humans are hanging back to also see how people interact with the robots as they pass by (Pink Dot is giving out hats if you snap a selfie with the robot).

The robot deliveries from Pink Dot are also free of charge, as opposed to the $5 – $10 fee that comes with humans making the deliveries. This free robot service should help kickstart adoption, but we’ll have to see if a fee is implemented if robots delivery becomes more widespread.

It should be noted that this robot delivery program is happening right on the heels of Uber completing its acquisition of Postmates. While Uber has dabbled in drone delivery, it hasn’t really talked publicly about sidewalk robot delivery. But Uber Eats is currently the revenue generator for Uber, and anything that could help bring costs down for burrito deliveries is something Uber will be interested in.

One interesting aspect of this Pink Dot + Postmates delivery deal is that the robots are being co-branded by Pink Dot. So these robots won’t be serving any other restaurants or markets in the area. This also means that they’ll be advertising Pink Dot as they are out and about. Kiwi robots, which started rolling out in San Jose this past summer, have Kiwi branding and serve multiple restaurants in different neighborhoods there. Starship’s robots, which are making grocery deliveries in Modesto, CA, also carry their own Starship branding.

We bring it up because delivery robots are still an emerging business and there are questions around business models that make the most sense. Should robots be part of a third-party delivery fleet serving many restaurants, or leased directly to one restaurant/grocer for its own use?

Whether or not a robot is being leased by a particular establishment is also important because it speaks to the infrastructure needed to implement robot deliveries. If the robots are Pink Dot’s, then they will presumably live at that market, meaning they will wait and be charged there until they leave to make a delivery. If robots serve multiple restaurants, that raises questions about where the robots stay when they aren’t in use and where they are charged. For example, will they clutter city sidewalks?

We sent a note to Postmates with some follow up questions and will update this post when we hear back.

For those in WeHo who want to get a glimpse of the future, Pink Dot’s robots are available for delivery now, but only during daylight hours.