Starship Technologies

Starship Technologies is an Estonian company developing autonomous delivery vehicles. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with engineering operations in Tallinn, Estonia and in Helsinki, Finland. Starship also has offices in London, UK, Germany, Washington, DC and Mountain View, California.

In January and February 2022, Starship raised nearly $100 million in funding from European Investment Bank and venture investors, which is expected to be put towards research and development and 1,700 additional robots to the company’s fleet. The company has raised approximately $202 million since being founded in 2014.

History

Starship Technologies was founded by Skype co-founders Janus Friis and Ahti Heinla.

Initially, it was called Project Echo.

A core team of the company became the team ''Kuukulgur'', which led by Ahti Heinla had participated in NASA Centennial Challenge by building experimental sample retrieval robots. Starship Technologies OÜ was registered on 11 June 2014 in Tallinn, Estonia.

Starship Technologies, Inc., a Delaware corporation, was registered in San Francisco, United States, on 28 September 2016.

Starship Technologies launched pilot services in 2016, in the US and the UK among other countries, with commercial services launched in 2017. In April 2018, Starship launched its autonomous delivery service in Milton Keynes (England), in partnership with Co-op and Tesco.

In March 2020, Starship became the first robot delivery service to operate in a British town center with the rollout of its service in Milton Keynes.

By November 2020, said Starship, Milton Keynes had the 'world's largest autonomous robot fleet'

In January 2019, Starship partnered with Sodexo to launch robot food delivery services at George Mason University. With a fleet of 25 robots at launch, this was the largest implementation of autonomous robot food delivery services on a university campus that time. In 2019, it expanded its services to Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Purdue University in West Lafayette, University of Pittsburgh, James Madison University in Virginia, University of Wisconsin in Madison, University of Houston, and University of Texas at Dallas.

In 2020, Starship expanded operations to the University of Mississippi and Bowling Green State University.

In March 2020 following the COVID-19 pandemic, Starship made many redundancies. However, half a year later, and after the universities reopened, it rehired many of the staff.

In October 2021, Starship announced that its autonomous delivery robots have completed 2 million deliveries worldwide, and have surpassed 100,000 road crossings daily.
According to the company, it reached 100,000 deliveries in August 2019 and 500,000 deliveries in June 2020.

As of January 2022, Starship’s autonomous delivery robots have made more than 2.5 million autonomous deliveries, and have traveled over 3 million miles globally. On average, the fleet makes 10,000 autonomous deliveries per day.

Additionally, in 2022, Starship formed a delivery partnership with the Co-op in Cambridgeshire to deliver groceries and more to people in Cambourne. Starship's robots will serve 12,000 residents in up to 5,000 different homes. By August 2022, the service was expanded to other nearby areas.

In December, 2022 Starship starred to deliver to the 20,000 residents the Adel and Tinshill areas of Leeds in partership again with local Co-op grocery store.

Operations

Starship develops and operates the last mile delivery robots. The electric-powered robots ride on sidewalks at a pedestrian speed, with a max speed of , can be remote-controlled if autonomous operation fails, and will only be used for relatively short-range local delivery. The robots use feature detection of edges and mapping techniques to determine the suitability of navigable terrain. The robot weighs unloaded, and can hold up to of deliveries. Their average battery life is 18 hours, and the typical robot can travel around 40km per day. The robots are equipped with a sensor suite that includes cameras, GPS inertial measurement unit, ultrasonic sensors, radar, and possibly also other sensors but notably no lidar. The robots have speakers, so they can communicate with humans they meet. Users order deliveries through Starship via the company’s iOS and Android applications. Once the robot arrives to make a delivery, the user receives an alert and can unlock the robot through the app once their identity has been verified through biometric authentication technology.

Before operating commercially, the service has been tested in over 100 cities and 20 countries around the world. The company operates in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Finland and Estonia. From 2019 onwards, Starship focuses mainly on delivery services on college campuses. It has announced plans to expand its service to 100 university campuses in the United States, with the goal of reaching one million students. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Starship expanded the number of delivery robots used for grocery in both the UK, and in the US to help with the delivery driver shortage.

Sustainability

According to Starship, its technology operates delivery robots that are "powered by zero carbon electricity, with the average delivery for a Starship robot consuming as little energy as boiling the kettle to make a single cup of tea". Starship Technologies worked in conjunction with Milton Keynes Council to conduct a study to review the impact of zero-emissions robots in cities over the course of 3 years. According to the study report, "Starship’s fleet has prevented 280,000 car journeys, and over 500,000 miles travelled in cars, leading to 137 tons of CO₂ saved, and 22 kg of NOx saved during the study period".

Corporate matters

The Starship's original headquarters were established in London but were moved to San Francisco in 2018.

Its engineering operations are located in Tallinn, Estonia and in Helsinki, Finland.

In 2014–2018, Allan Martinson served as the chief operating officer of Starship. In 2018, the chief executive officer Ahti Heinla switched to the position of the chief technology officer and Lex Bayer, Airbnb's former head of business development, payments, and Airbnb for business, was hired as the new CEO.

Starship hired Alastair Westgarth, former CEO of Google X company, Loon, as their CEO in June 2021.

By 2019, Starship had received US$85 million in venture funding.

In addition to Janus Friis and Ahti Heinla, other investors include Airbnb co-founder Nathan Blecharczyk, Skype founding engineer Jaan Tallinn, Morpheus Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Matrix Partners, MetaPlanet Holdings, Daimler AG, Grishin Robotics, ZX Ventures, Playfair Capital and others.

In January 2022, Starship received a €50 million investment from the European Investment Bank.

Starship also announced a partnership with Veriff in January 2022 to provide authentication and re-verification services for its fleet of autonomous delivery robots in the UK. This partnership makes Starship the first company to create a fully autonomous end-to-end delivery service for age restricted items.

Economically, Starship’s robots are considered to be cheaper than a human equivalent when compared to human-staffed delivery services like DoorDash. Each of Starship’s 1,200 robots cost as much as a laptop and can run for 18 hours after being charged.

See also

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** Nuro, a similar autonomous delivery vehicle, though larger at the size of a tiny car, and driving on the road.
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References

External links

* {{official, https://www.starship.xyz/

2014 establishments in Estonia
Robotics companies of Estonia
Logistics companies of Estonia
Robotics companies of the United States
Logistics companies of the United States
Technology companies established in 2014
Transport companies established in 2014
Transportation companies based in California