How it started
History
Starship Technologies was founded by Skype co-founders Janus Friis and Ahti Heinla in 2014 in Tallinn, Estonia. Heinla and Friis had taken part in a NASA competition, the Centennial Challenge, to design and build autonomous robots to retrieve geological samples. While their team (named 'Kuukulgur', or 'Moon Rover') did not win the competition, Heinla and Friis began working to apply the technology they had developed to the problem of last mile delivery following a meeting in London. 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 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 Central Milton Keynes. By November 2020, Starship claimed that Milton Keynes had the 'world's largest autonomous robot fleet'. By March 2023 the company was delivering in seven British cities.
In January 2019, Starship partnered with Sodexo to launch robot food delivery services at George Mason University in Virginia, US. With a fleet of 25 robots at launch, this was the largest implementation of autonomous robot food delivery services on a university campus at that time. In 2019, it expanded its services to six other US universities.
and in 2020 to two more.
In March 2020, following the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Starship laid off an undisclosed number of employees. However, half a year later, it rehired many of the staff.
From Wikipedia’s article on Starship Technologies, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3