Robots Are Taking Over Deliveries (And It's a Good Thing!)

Hello, I'm Amy Shapiro, journalist at CEK and we're here today at Mind the Tech London 2025. We're joined by Kit Proper, director of customer success at Starship Technologies. Kmet, thank you so much for joining us today. >> Pleasure of being here. Thank you. Absolute pleasure to have you. Um, so to start off with, uh, can you explain kind of in layman's terms what Starship Technologies is and what it, uh, what it is that you produce? Yes. So I'm pretty

sure that not a lot of people are familiar with Starship technology although we operate now for almost 10 years. >> Uh so we develop and operate autonomous delivery robot for last mile delivery. Uh it mean that everywhere that there is a movement of small goods uh in relatively short distance around 4 kilometer. We actually uh autonomously and safely do this delivery. We operate uh in a four different verticals. So,

universities, groceries, delivery app and industrial >> uh and we currently completed over one 10 million deliveries worldwide, over 100 service area in different countries. >> Amazing. So, I'm interested in in what

your position as director of customer success entails. You touched on uh universities, but uh who who are who else is your main customer base? And so if you know delivery apps for example, everyone I'm sure pretty much uh use world delivery door dash. So these are kind of customers that we work with. Um, so when you do uh your food delivery or your grocery delivery, you know, you're at home, you have backto-back meeting, you need your uh milk and bread, the kids are coming back home, you don't have the time, then you just do the order and instead of human carrier, it's just like a very small cute robot uh arriving to your door, you open it with your phone and then you send it back to the store and it's all done autonomously and uh very safely as well. >> So So what does customer success mean for you? >> So what customer success? So our model

is basically lend and expand. It's mean that um because it's such a new concept because there is a lot of complexity when it's come to uh you know regulation social acceptance etc. we always start very small so we usually start with a small pilot with one store and then my role is actually to prove the concept >> and make it bigger. So I can give you an

example in Finland for example we started to work with S group um few years ago um again just operating in a few stores uh we now have almost 200 stores there um so we work on solving the day-to-day problem and making sure that they're getting value from our robot basically uh that we develop together the concept of the next generation of the robot >> uh and by that obviously we have the opportunity to grow together with them and operate in more stores and have more deliveries M and and when looking at the the future of this or even at present the the what the next robot looks like uh it's we're obviously in the midst of an AI revolution. So I'm interested in how the this is impacted the industry that you're in. >> So that's a very good question because

we actually use AI in the real world. So we use what call emboded AI. Uh there is uh computer vision, there are um a sensor, there is uh um um fus fusion sensors etc. And also um real-time navigation. So the robot actually learn how to navigate, how to interact with um you know with obstacle with pedestrian with uh cycles in the street and every time that we do another develop the another delivery the robot will operate better will be smarter. Um so this is sort of how we actually apply uh the AI on the real world. >> Um and um with a time you know uh um the

robot will be able to do much more complex things. So we are always um doing crossroading. Uh for example when we just started to operate we used to do it manually. Now the robot can actually do it independently. So he know when to cross the road when it's safe for him to cross the road or for her. [laughter] So I guess that leads to my final

question which is uh what is the future of autonomous robot delivery? If if there is a big picture that we're working towards what >> obviously I believe that robot delivery is the future >> but uh really if you look at um the logistic chain the last mile delivery it's the most expensive and complex part of it sometime count to 50% of the all cost of the uh logistic chain. So we're coming here to solve a very specific problem. Uh we operate in a cost-ffective way. Uh when there is a problem in labor cost, we actually coming and making sure that we're doing it a friction of the cost >> but also we are very sustainable. So one delivery take less than 10 gram of CO2. >> Uh so it's also impact the uh carbon footprint as well. um and that traffic congestion and more and more and more there are the issue of you know social acceptance and regulation and etc etc but these are the things that um you know we are working together with uh autonomies and with other team in order to solve it and I believe that uh in a few years from now you will see it everywhere in the street basically delivering food groceries you know pharmaceutical etc etc >> amazing well I'm looking forward to that

future karm thank you so much for your time and I hope you enjoy the rest of your day here at Mind. Thank you very much.