Veteran autonomous delivery robot developer Starship Technologies announced it had raised an additional $90 million in funding to help expand its micro-logistics service to additional territories around the globe.
Starship Technologies was founded in 2014 by Skype co-founders Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis based on the idea that autonomy can help many of the challenges in last-mile deliveries. The company’s L4 autonomous delivery robots have completed over six million trips to date, transporting meals, packages, groceries, and important documents to students and other customers.
In August 2023, that mileage total was five million, operating in 30 different areas. Today, Starship’s robots have expanded to 80 locations worldwide, including the US, UK, Germany, Denmark, Estonia, and Finland.
During its decade-long run, the autonomous delivery robot developer had raised $160 million but just shared that it has garnered an additional $90 million to continue to expand its last-mile delivery services.
Starship to expand autonomous delivery robot services
In a press release today, Starship Technologies shared details of its $90 million funding round co-led by the hedge fund Plural and UK venture capital investment firm Iconical. Starship states the fresh funds will be used to expand its autonomous robot delivery operations worldwide and capitalize on the growing demand for seamless home deliveries.
In addition to the expansion across new territories, while providing Delivery-as-a-Service (DaaS) to its existing partners like Sodexo and Grubhub, Starship plans to continue developing machine learning to further develop its AI, wireless charging infrastructure and other last-mile delivery technology. Starship Technologies co-founder and CEO Ahti Heinla elaborated:
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.
Starship states that each autonomous delivery robot can run for 18 hours straight on a full charge and can safely navigate snow, rocky terrain, and other route blockages on a given route. The average delivery only uses the same amount of energy as boiling a kettle for a single cup of tea.
To date, the startup’s wheelie-popping, talking robots have displaced nearly 1.8M kg of carbon dioxide. Watch the robots in action in Starship’ ‘s video below.