Starship Technologies


Starship Technologies is a company developing small self-driving robotic delivery vehicles. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with engineering operations in Tallinn, Estonia, and a satellite team in Helsinki, Finland. Starship also has offices in London, UK, Germany, Washington, DC and Mountain View, California.

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, United Kingdom, in partnership with Co-op and Tesco. In March 2020, Starship became the first robot delivery service to operate in a British town centre with the rollout of its service in Milton Keynes.
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, 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, it launched its service in Washington DC's Broad Branch Market.
In March 2020 following the COVID-19 pandemic, Starship made a large number of redundancies. The company did not publish how many of 260 employees in Estonia it had dismissed.

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. 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.
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, and Estonia. It has announced plans to expand its service to 100 university campuses in the United States, with the goal of reaching one million students.

Corporate issues

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, with a satellite team in Helsinki, Finland.
Since 2018, the chief executive officer of Starship is Lex Bayer. Ahti Heinla acts as the chief technology officer of the company. In 2014–2018, Allan Martinson served as the chief operating officer of Starship.
Starship has won US$85 million seed funding. In addition to Janus Friis and Ahti Heinla also Airbnb cofounder Nathan Blecharczyk, Skype founding engineer Jaan Tallinn, Morpheus Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Matrix Partners, MetaPlanet Holdings, Daimler AG, Grishin Robotics, ZX Ventures, and Playfair Capital have invested into the company, among others.