Short of a crystal ball, it’s hard to know how all of this will shake out. Delivery by Starship integrates into retailers’ existing platforms to make food delivery more sustainable and efficient. We have just launched “Delivery by Starship” with Grubhub and we’re in multiple discussions with other partners to offer our world-leading robot delivery experience as a B2B delivery-as-a-service solution. Starship CCO Ryan Tuohy tells TechCrunch:

The list starts with University of Kentucky the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Wayne State University Southern Methodist University and Fairfield University, with eight or nine more schools being added by end of year. This week Starship announced a partnership with Grubhub that brings its delivery bot to a number of college campuses across the U.S. There’s plenty of VC being pumped into it, and there are a lot of reports around new partnerships. This space continues to be an interesting one to watch. Image Credits: Starship/Copyright Don Liebig/ASUCLA Starship delivery robots at UCLA campus on January 15, 2021. We are working with employees during this transition, matching them to open roles that best fit their experience and skills. As a result, we are ending our field tests and reorienting the program. Amazon tells TechCrunch:ĭuring our limited field test for Scout, we worked to create a unique delivery experience but learned through feedback that there were aspects of the program that weren’t meeting customers’ needs. A few will remain with the (not entirely dead) project and still others will fill suitable roles inside the company. The ~400-person team will mostly scatter to the wind. Last week, Amazon confirmed reports that it has scaled back real-world piloting for its last-mile delivery robot, Scout. It could be a blessing, it could be a curse, but it is never, under any circumstances, not an option.

Life isn’t a motivational poster dressed up as a LinkedIn post - it’s life, and failure is sitting around like a teenager loitering in the 7-Eleven parking lot. It’s not a good option, and it’s certainly not the option anyone is hoping for, but to suggest it’s not an option is really just a fundamental misunderstanding of what the word “option” means. It’s a story about what happens when your high-profile pilot doesn’t turn out as planned.įailure is always an option. I don’t love devoting the first several paragraphs of this newsletter to Amazon every week, but no one is making waves - both good and bad - in the robotics space quite like the little mom-and-pop bookseller from Seattle, Washington.

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