Starship Technologies is fresh off a recent $40 million funding round, and the robotics startup finds itself in a much-changed market compared to when it got its start in 2014. Founded by software industry veterans, including Skype and Rdio co-founder Janus Friis, Starship’s focus is entirely on building and commercializing fleets of autonomous sidewalk delivery robots.
Starship invented this category when it debuted, but five years later it’s one of a number of companies looking to deploy what essentially amounts to wheeled, self-driven coolers that can carry small packages and everyday freight, including fresh food, to waiting customers. CEO Lex Bayer, a former sales leader from Airbnb, took over the top spot at Starship last year and is eager to focus the company’s efforts in a drive to take full advantage of its technology and experience lead.
The result is transforming what looked, to all external observers, like a long-tail technology play into a thriving commercial enterprise.
“We want to do 100 universities in the next 24 months, and we’ll do about 25 to 50 robots on each campus,” Bayer said in an interview about his company’s plans for the future.
“And they’re operating 8 a.m. to 2 a.m. It’s just been amazing to see how many universities have reached out asking for the service, how many food service companies are reaching out to us to help bring this service and their offerings to universities as well.”
It’s an aggressive target, but one that Bayer seems confident the company can hit, largely because it’s going all-in on the college market in an effort to not get sidelined by the many options available to them.
“As a company that’s a startup still, we have to always focus, and have sequencing in terms of how we grow,” he said.
“The university campus has just been pulling our business forward — only are students pulling it, meaning there are more orders than the restaurant from the robots can keep up with so we had to add restaurants and add hours,” Bayer explained. “Late night is particularly big on university campuses, as well as eating breakfast — which is becoming a thing, now that our robots are there, students are eating more breakfast. And so we’ve seen signal from the students, and we’ve also seen signal from universities reaching out to us and from the food service providers.”
It’s an ideal market for a number of reasons, but one of the most important ones is that demand is currently underserved. And not demand for autonomous robot delivery, but demand for the core value they offer of on-demand food delivery at a more basic level.
“The reason is because there really aren’t delivery options on campuses today,” Bayer explained. “We show up, we deploy a robot, and suddenly, the students can get this — and this is a generation that has grown up expecting everything to be on their phone. They’re digital natives, they expect the world with on-demand services. And so when we offer it to them; they obviously use it a lot.”
Other verticals in which Starship operates are successful, Bayer tells me, including via its grocery delivery pilot in Milton Keynes, just outside of London in the U.K. Still, despite the lure of chasing every experiment that looks promising, the company is confident in its decision to build the university business first.
“It’s just the one [type of market] that makes the most interesting focus now, because we’re a startup and we’re growing, and sequencing our company’s growth,” he said. “But if we look at our grocery business, it’s doing tremendously well, you know, the companies we’re partnered with want us to expand as well — we just can’t do everything at the same time.”
Another reason to keep the campus at the fore: Acclimating the clientele to the presence of the robots is more of a solved problem. Every time we write about delivery robots on TechCrunch, someone invariably comments that the portly vehicles look easy to vandalize or break into. But with schools, there’s a tendency to quickly adapt, Bayer notes.
“We become part of the infrastructure of the university,” he said. “If you go to these universities, you will see that after we’ve been there for a while, the students pretty much ignore the robots and they’re just a part of campus life — everyone knows about them. So we’re walking along pathways and sidewalks with hundreds of students, and they’re just walking alongside them as if it’s nothing. We really like that, because it shows that our technology blends into society and essentially becomes a part of infrastructure of everyday life.”
This isn’t a benefit that remains limited to schools — it’s a seed planted that should bear fruit across all markets, as students go into the workforce and age into being tomorrow’s mainstream market.
“I think if you go and see these robots in action, it’s unmistakable,” Bayer said. “Once you see it, you realize you can’t put this technology back in a box: This is coming, and we will have a whole generation of students that live in a world where they expect to receive things by robots delivered to them on their schedule, at their convenience. And then they when they go out into the rest of the world and into neighborhoods and cities, they’re going to expect the same thing.”
As for the growing number of competitors out there that are similarly recognizing this will become generally expected, Bayer doesn’t seem that concerned. As he pointed out, Starship’s early entry into the autonomous delivery category means it has certain advantages that are hard for anyone else to match.
“It’s a terrible pun, but we’re literally miles and miles ahead of any competitors,” he notes. “We’ve done 100,000 commercial deliveries, we’ve driven over 350,000 miles, we’ve crossed over 4 million streets, we’re doing deliveries at 8 a.m. to 2 a.m., in most places, seven days a week. We do this in the daytime and nighttime, during rain — it’s even snowed in a few of our locations where we do this, and we do this with no handlers behind our robots, no one’s been following any of our robots for over two years. These robots are out there in the wild doing this all on their own.”
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