Starship raises $90m for AI, wireless charging to take on Deliveroo
Robot delivery firm Starship Technologies has raised $90m to expand its autonomous robot delivery service globally with AI and wireless charging.
The latest round for Starship was led by co-led by Plural and Iconical and will be used to expand its delivery service beyond the current six markets in Europe and the US. This brings the total investment to $230m since 2014.
The new investment round will enable Starship to use continuing advances in AI and machine learning to further develop its AI, tech and wireless charging infrastructure, as it expands to more markets internationally – particularly with its Delivery as a Service (DaaS) product, which sees Starship robots integrate into the delivery infrastructure of its partners.
- Starship raises €50m from EU for autonomous delivery
- Surge in online orders boosts warehouse robots industry
The company currently operates its autonomous robots in the US, UK, Germany, Denmark, Estonia and Finland, to deliver takeaways, grocery orders, tools and corporate documents.
Starship has introduced groundbreaking wireless charging for its robots at George Mason University in the US so that the robots can now recharge autonomously and wirelessly in between deliveries. Starship plans to roll out its wireless charging solution globally in the months to come.
The company is pitching the lower carbon of the robot delivery, particularly as the online food delivery market in particular is expected to more than double by 2030. Each Starship robot can run for 18 hours fully charged, and the robots use 110W at full speed.
By using robots, rather than humans on low wages riding through traffic, it has pioneered a more ethical, sustainable business that is used by customers including Bolt, Co-Op, Grubhub and Sodexo says the company in a dig at Deliveroo, Just Eat and Uber Eats.
The robots are 99% autonomous and can react safely to difficult situations and obstacles, including snow, rocky terrain and blockages en route, with three crossings made on average every second around the world. It took six years for Starship to reach one million deliveries and half that to complete the next five million.
The engineering team is based at the founding office in Tallinn, Estonia, in its global HQ, San Francisco and across the US, UK, Denmark, Finland and Germany.
“Autonomous delivery isn’t some science fiction concept from Bladerunner for decades in the future, it’s a reality for hundreds of thousands of people every day. Building a company like Starship takes at least a decade of perfecting the technology, streamlining operations and reducing costs to make last-mile autonomous delivery viable and sustainable at scale. Now we’re ready to take on the world and with ambitions to build a category-dominating company that can change the daily lives of millions of people in thousands of locations worldwide,” said Ahti Heinla, Co-founder and CEO at Starship Technologies.
www.starship.xyz; pluralplatform.com; iconical.com
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