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Starship Technologies has invented the autonomous walkway delivery robot category and, to date, has made more than 100,000 commercial shipments on behalf of customers. The milestone comes as Starship adds $ 40 million in Series A funding, bringing its total funding to $ 85 million. When it announced an additional $ 25 million in June 2018, Starship was also piloting its first university deployment – and the company now has a project to expand to 100 university campuses over the next two years, depending on the strength of this pilot project.
"When I took office, I was testing a variety of targeted marketing strategies," said Lex Bayer, CEO, Starship Technologies. "We were testing grocery delivery, college campuses, corporate campuses, industrial campuses, and we found tremendous traction in most of these environments. Our grocery store in North London, Milton Keynes, is developing exceptionally well […] But one of the experiments was to try university campuses. And I think you know, as a company that is still a start-up, we still need to focus on growing our business. And the university campus has just advanced our business – not just our students, but more orders than the restaurant can handle, sorry, we had to add restaurants and overtime. So we saw the signal from the students, but we also saw the signal from the universities that contact us, as well as the food service providers. "
This vertical focus on post-secondary institutions will see the deployment of Starship robots at the University of Pittsburgh and Purdue University, Indiana, on September 9, and many more will follow. Starship's ambitious goal is to deploy to 100 schools over the next two years, as noted, and will use this funding to continue its expansion. As Bayer notes, the market's appetite is strong and it's a way to show that robots can work in all kinds of environments, on and off campus, that blend seamlessly into the streets and sidewalks of the city. city. In addition, the student population has proven to be the ideal initial client base.
"I think you know, starting with the younger generation is always good for that," said Bayer. "Because they perceive the world of a large part, that's what the world can be; they are not cluttered with all the past and the way things were done before. So when you give them a better solution, they use it and say, "Oh, that's the way it should be. This is how things should evolve. & # 39; "
And this perceived normality leads to high usage: one of the robots serving one of the universities where Starship is installed manages to travel the equivalent of the distance between San Francisco and New York, which is quite an achievement if you consider that they travel at a maximum speed of four miles per hour. Starship's all-electric delivery robots totaled 350,000 miles on its delivery trips and delivered 9,000 rolls of this type and 15,000 bananas, among other grocery and grocery products.
"The early years really showed that it could be done and that this technology was even possible," said Bayer. "It took us four years to get to the first 10,000 deliveries. Then it took us eight months to go from 10,000 deliveries to 50,000 deliveries. We now have less than four months to reach 100,000 deliveries. This is an important step and we are the first autonomous vehicle builder to do so. This is something we are obviously very proud of. But it really shows the kind of inflection that our company is going through and the way we are really evolving. "
Starship funding during this round was led by Morpheus Ventures and included existing investors Shasta Ventures, Matrix Partners, MetaPlanet Holdings, etc., as well as new investors, TDK Ventures, Qu Ventures and others.
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