INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Joanna Glasner
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Bots replacing office workers drive big
valuations
Getting personal: Funding rises for software-driven tastemakers
Much of the last couple of decades of innovation
has centered around finding ways to get what we want without leaving the sofa.
So far, online ordering and on-demand delivery have allowed
us to largely accomplish this goal
Just point, click and wait
But there one catch: Delivery people
We can never all lie around ordering pizzas if someone still has to deliver them.
Enter robots
In tech-futurist circles, it pretty commonplace to hearpredictionsabout how some medley of autonomous vehicles and AI-enabled bots will take
over doorstep deliveries in the coming years
They&ll bring us takeout, drop off our packages and displace lots of humans who currently make a living doing these things.
If this vision
does become reality, there a strong chance it&ll largely be due to a handful of early-stage startups currently working to roboticize
Below, we take a look at who they are, what they&re doing, who backing them and where they&re setting up shop.
The players
Crunchbase data
unearthed at least eight companies in the robot delivery space with headquarters or operations in North America that have secured seed or
early-stage funding in the past couple of years.
They range from heavily funded startups to lean seed-stage operations
Silicon Valley-basedNuro, an autonomous delivery startup founded by former engineers atAlphabet Waymo, is the most heavily funded, having
raised$92 million to date
Others have raised a few million.
In the chart below, we look at key players, ranked by funding to date, along with their locations and key
investors.
Who your backer
While startups may be paving the way for robot delivery, they&re not doing so alone
One of the ways larger enterprises are keeping a toehold in the space is through backing and partnering with early-stage startups
They&re joining a long list of prominent seed and venture investors also eagerly eyeing the sector.
The list of larger corporate investors
includes Germany Daimler, the lead investor inStarship Technologies
China&sTencent, meanwhile, is backing San Francisco-basedMarble, while Toyota AI Ventures has invested inBoxbot.
As for partnering, takeout
food delivery services seem to be the most active users of robot couriers.
Starship, whose bot has been described as a slow-moving,
medium-sized cooler on six wheels, is making particularly strong inroads in takeout
The San Francisco- and Estonia-based company, launched by Skype founders Janus Friis and Ahti Heinla, is teaming up
withDoorDashandPostmatesin parts of California and Washington, DC
It also working with the Domino pizza chain in Germany and the Netherlands.
Robby Technologies, another maker of cute, six-wheeled bots, has
also beenpartneringwith Postmates in parts of Los Angeles
AndMarble, which is branding its boxy bots as &your friendly neighborhood robot,& teamed uplast yearfor a trial with Yelp in San
Francisco.
San Francisco Bay Area dominates
While their visions of world domination are necessarily global, the robot delivery talent pool
remains rather local.
Six of the eight seed- and early-stage startups tracked by Crunchbase are based in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the
remaining two have some operations in the region.
Why is this Partly, there a concentration of talent in the area, with key engineering
staff coming from larger local companies like Uber, Tesla and Waymo .Plus, of course, there a ready supply of investor capital, which bot
startups presumably will need as they scale.
Silicon Valley and San Francisco, known for scarce and astronomically expensive housing, are
also geographies in which employers struggle to find people to deliver stuff at prevailing wages to the hordes of tech workers toiling at
projects like designing robots to replace them.
That said, the region isn&t entirely friendly territory for slow-moving sidewalk robots
In San Francisco, already home to absurdly steep streets and sidewalks crowded with humans and discarded scooters, city legislatorsvotedto
ban delivery robots from most places and severely restrict them in areas where permitted.
The rise of the pizza delivery robot manager
But
while San Francisco may be wary of a delivery robot invasion, other geographies, including nearby Berkeley, Calif., where startupKiwi
Campusoperates, have been more welcoming.
In the process, they&re creating an interesting new set of robot overseer jobs that could shed
some light on the future of last-mile delivery employment.
For some startups in early trial mode, robot wrangling jobs involve shadowing
bots and making sure they carry out their assigned duties without travails.
Remote robot management is also a thing and will likely see the
Starship, for instance, relies on operators in Estonia to track and manage bots as they make their deliveries in faraway countries.
For now,
it too early to tell whether monitoring and controlling hordes of delivery bots will provide better pay and working conditions than
old-fashioned human delivery jobs.
At least, however, much of it could theoretically be done while lying on the sofa.
