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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Starship Technologies

Half a Million Deliveries & Counting: A Five-Year Snapshot of Sidewalk Robot Deliveries at George Mason

This week, sidewalk robot delivery startup Starship Technologies celebrated the fifth anniversary of its first campus deployment in the US and, as part of its announcement, gave us a peek into how its fleet has grown over the past half-decade at George Mason University (Mason).

According to Starship, their robots started rolling around Mason on January 22, 2019. Since then, they’ve grown their fleet from its initial 25 robots to 60 and the number of merchants around campus from 4 to 18. According to Starship, the Mason fleet is the world’s largest sidewalk robot delivery fleet.

Here are some of the stats about the Mason deployment sent to The Spoon:

  • Nearly 500,000 deliveries have been made.
  • The robot fleet has covered over 474,225 miles.
  • A single student has made a record 880 orders.
  • The most popular menu item has been The Original Double ‘N Fries from Steak’ n Shake, ordered 15,779 times.

It’s all interesting and impressive in some respects, but I have to admit the stat I am most curious about is the student who’s ordered using the company’s sidewalk robot 880(!) times. I’m unsure if Starship has a loyalty program, but that’s essentially the sidewalk robot equivalent of the airline million-mile club.

According to the company, since it was first deployed at Mason, the Starship fleet saw its service grow from 25,000 deliveries and 150,000 miles traveled in 2019 to over 2,000 robots, 5 million deliveries completed, and over 7 million fleet delivery miles traveled.

That it’s a university setting where Starship has racked up the most miles and has grown its fleet to its largest single deployment makes lots of sense; not only are university campuses optimized for foot traffic and have relatively predictable delivery destinations (dorms, and student halls), but they also have built-in and receptive customer populations who frequent the same locations.

Starship Appoints New CEO

Robot delivery company Starship announced today that Alastair Westgarth has been appointed the company’s new CEO, effective immediately.

Prior to joining Starship, Westgarth was CEO at Alphabet’s Loon, which was focused on using high-altitude balloons to deliver internet access to underserved communities around the world. That endeavor was shut down in January of this year. Before joining Loon in 2017, Westgarth was CEO at Quintel Solutions and a Vice President at Nortel.

Starship makes small, cooler-sized autonomous delivery robots. The company really started gaining traction in the U.S. over the past couple of years by providing food deliveries on college campuses. Starship has since broadened it services to include grocery delivery from Save Mart in Modesto, California. In May of this year, Starship started making deliveries from select Costa Coffee locations in the town of Milton Keynes in the U.K.

The appointment of a new CEO comes during a time of growth for Starship. In January, the company raised an additional $17 million in funding (bringing its total fundraising to $102 million). The company’s delivery robots are now available to more than 1 million people on a daily basis, and last month it announced that it had quadrupled deliveries globally since the start of the pandemic. To date, Starship has completed more than 1.5 million commercial deliveries around the world.

The pandemic has accelerated interest in robot delivery, thanks to its contactless nature. Since Starship launched, a number of robot delivery startups have launched around the world including Kiwibot and Postmates here in the U.S., Yandex in Russia, Woowa Brothers in South Korea, and Bizero in Turkey. The question for all of these startups now is whether the building, maintaining and deploying all of these robots can scale in an economical way.

According to the press announcement sent out today, Starship’s co-founder, Ahti Heinla, will now be taking on the role of CTO. The company did not specify what new role, if any fellow co-founder Janus Friis would be taking.

Starship’s Robots are Headed for School and Corporate Campuses

Starship Technologies today announced a major commercial rollout (pardon the pun) of its small, autonomous robot delivery vehicles to academic and corporate campuses across the U.S. and Europe. In a press statement, the company said it will deploy more than 1,000 robots by the end of the year.

Starship’s robots have already been in use on Intuit’s 4.3 acre campus to deliver food and office supplies to workers. As shown in the video below, people can use the Starship app to order food and choose a pickup point (only outside deliveries for now, not inside their building or to their desk). The app will tell them when their package will arrive and once there, customers use their phone to unlock the robot and take their food.

Starship Campus Delivery Service with Robots

Focusing on corporate and academic campuses is a smart play by Starship. First and foremost, this move presumably sidesteps any legal and municipal issues associated with autonomous robot deliveries on public streets. While pilot programs for robot delivery are happening in various cities across the country, San Francisco--a hotbed for early adopter activity – has put tight restrictions on them. By transitioning from public sidewalks to private campuses Starship’s robots can be more free-range, as it were.

In fact, today’s announcement comes 13 days after Starship was supposed to hold a press conference in which the mayor of San Jose was reportedly going to help “welcome Starship delivery robots to the city.” As far as I can tell, that press conference never happened. I reached out to Starship after the press conference evaporated to find out why, but never heard back.

It’s also a smart move to stick with campuses for the good of the robots. At least on corporate campuses, there will be less chance of vandalism, theft or accident befalling the cute li’l delivery vehicles. And even though campuses aren’t urban environments, there is enough infrastructure in place for the robot to learn how to better navigate people, roads, and traffic to get smarter.

Starship’s press release today said that it will continue to grow its residential neighborhood deliveries as well. In that arena, however, it will be competing with rival, Marble, which just last week closed its $10 million Series A. Starship, for its part, has raised $17.2 million from automotive company Daimler Benz.

If you’re at Intuit, or on a campus that gets one of these robots, be sure to take a pic and send it to us here at The Spoon.

San Francisco Restricts Robot Delivery

Before robots can rise up and take over the world, they will need to overcome… municipal laws. Case in point, San Francisco, where the Board of Supervisors voted to enact tight restrictions on the use of delivery robots in the city.

The ordinance allows companies to get a permit for the purposes of testing autonomous delivery devices–for research purposes only— and include a lengthy list of requirements including:

  • Robot can’t go faster than 3 miles per hour
  • A human operator needs to be within 30 feet
  • The robots have to give the right of way to people
  • Testing can only be done in certain areas of the city

The move from the SF board highlights the importance of humans in fulfilling the promise of automated robot delivery. While advances in robotics continues at a rapid clip, local governments tend to lag behind technology. Indeed, as Curbed writes, the SF board is saying this measure was a way to get ahead of an impending technology shift and not be caught off guard by one like they were with Uber and Google busses. Whether that plays out remains to be seen.

But while San Francisco dips its cautious toe in the robot delivery waters, other areas of the country are jumping in. SF neighbor, Redwood City has a robot delivery pilot program in effect with Starship Technologies, and other states such as Wisconsin, Virginia have passed laws allowing robot deliveries.

And if peer pressure to keep up with other governments isn’t enough, perhaps seeing cross-state rival, Los Angeles, roll out their Top Chef robot deliveries this week will light the robotic fire in San Francisco.

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