Starship Technologies obtains Series C for autonomous deliveries across the U.S.

Starship Technologies Inc. this month raised $50 million in Series C investment, bringing its total funding to date to more than $280 million. The company said it plans to scale its robotic deliveries from more than 60 U.S. university campuses and over 30 European cities to North American urban markets.

“Delivery robotics is the next wave of urban logistics, shaping a once-in-a-generation shift in how goods move through cities,” stated Ahti Heinla, co-founder and CEO of Starship Technologies. “We own European urban markets; we own U.S. campuses. Now it’s time to replicate this proven success in American cities. Millions of U.S. consumers will soon experience sub-30-minute delivery by Starship robots as the new standard.”

Founded in 2014 by Skype co-founders Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis, Starship said it has completed more than 9 million deliveries with over 2,700 robots operating across 270+ locations in seven countries. The San Francisco-based company claimed that it has built the largest autonomous delivery network globally, and it surpassed 8 million deliveries in April.

Starship focuses on long tail of autonomy

Starship Techologies said it has solved challenges including safety validation, regulatory approval across seven countries, all-weather reliability, and profitability at scale. Operating at SAE Level 4 autonomy, the delivery robots are more cost-efficient than traditional delivery methods, it asserted.

While many delivery robots are teleoperated, Starship has made steady progress in autonomy, according to Lindsay Roberts, director of autonomous driving at the company.

“We are actually making double-digit percentage improvements in autonomy every year,” he told The Robot Report. “It’s the number of seconds per kilometer where a human’s involved. As you go down the long tail of technology development, it gets harder and harder, but we’ve kept up this rate of reduction for a number of years now.”

Starship has benefitted from improvements in edge computing and artificial intelligence — without losing sight of safety, Roberts added.

“We have a ridiculous quantity of data available that we can pull from if we need to, way more than anyone could possibly use for training such an algorithm,” he noted. “You can still build small neural networks that are very good for targeted purposes. That’s essentially what we do. We essentially use a mix between classical algorithms, classical computer vision, and modern neural nets to make this run on the edge.”

“One of the biggest differences of working on autonomy compared with working on general software is, of course, that these things are physical manifestations,” said Roberts. “Safety must be interwoven with every change that you make. We have to test the whole robot as a package. So if you’re actually validating this robot works as you expect, you need to test everything. We’re extremely cautious about about these things.”

Starship is working with U.S. states and U.K. local councils to manage regulatory compliance, and it is focusing on growing customer acceptance of robotic deliveries, he explained. It is also working on extending battery life, improving hardware and software service, and further increasing autonomy.

Funding to fuel more partnerships

Plural, an early-stage investment fund that backs European technology founders, led Starship Technologies’ Series C round. Karma.vc, Latitude, Coefficient Capital, Skaala, and SmartCap (funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU) also participated. Starship raised $90 million last year.

“Starship has quietly built the most successful autonomous technology company in the world,” said Taavet Hinrikus, a partner at Plural. “They’re already deployed, already profitable, and already changing how goods move through cities. We’ve doubled down on our investment because the team has proven they can scale globally, and the opportunity in American urban markets is enormous.”

Starship said it will use the capital to accelerate U.S. market penetration, expand its robot fleet from about 2,700 robots today to over 12,000 by 2027, and strengthen partnerships with major retailers. The company has already partnered with Grubhub in the U.S., as well as with European platforms including Bolt, DoorDash’s Wolt, and Delivery Hero’s Foodora.

“We are doing huge amounts of grocery deliveries today,” said Roberts. “With 10 kg [22 lb.] in the package, you can actually put quite a bit, and especially if you run on a more frequent pop-up shopping mode. And the fact that small deliveries are cheaper lets you do this more frequently.”

“We want to make the last-mile movement of goods automatic,” he said. “If that’s the case, then you open up this whole area of things you couldn’t do before. My dream is to get a croissant delivered every morning by Rover, which would be a crazy thing to do if you had a person doing it.”