Robotic delivery company Starship Technologies has raised $90 million in new funding with Starship robots having now made over six million deliveries from takeaway orders to groceries, the firm said.
The new funding, co-led by Plural and Iconical, brings the total raised by Starship to $230M since its creation in 2014, and will be used to fuel further expansion as the company looks to benefit from growing global demand in home deliveries.
Additionally, the company said the new investment round will allow it to make advances in AI and machine learning. This includes further developing its wireless charging infrastructure which it introduced recently at George Mason University in the US and plans to roll out globally in the coming months.
A decade after the company’s launch, Starship’s delivery robots can be found in the US, UK, Germany, Denmark, Estonia and Finland, among other countries.
The online food delivery market in particular is expected to more than double by 2030, whilst the carbon emissions from last-mile delivery in Europe alone are expected to reach 5.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2032, the equivalent to 1.2 million gas-powered cars. Despite this, Starship says its robots, which can run for 18 hours fully charged, tackle this key industry challenge by offering a more cost-effective, ethical and sustainable way to deliver goods directly to a customer over a short distance.
According to the firm, 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. While it reportedly took six years for Starship to reach one million deliveries it has taken has half that to complete the next five million.
Ahti Heinla, Co-founder and CEO at Starship Technologies, said: “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.”
Taavet Hinrikus, Partner at Plural, added: “For the past 10 years, the team have been working tirelessly to build the most advanced autonomous logistics technology in the world, driving more miles and making more deliveries than any other company, whilst reducing the impact of last-mile and on-demand delivery on the planet. The culmination of this hard work over the past decade and this new funding means Starship is well-positioned for accelerated growth.”
