Only a few months after expanding to Pleasanton and announcing nearly $100 million in new funding, Starship Technologies is pulling back its robot delivery services in some markets and laying off 11% of its global workforce.
The San Francisco company is developing a fleet of small autonomous vehicles that can hold about four standard-sized bags of groceries. Over the past several years, it has deployed delivery services around the U.S., U.K. and Germany in partnership with retail merchants, universities and other businesses.
It launched its commercial services in 2018 in Milton Keynes, a region about 50 miles north-west of London, and by 2020 it had launched in Mountain View — its first service area in California, according to a timeline on its website.
Starship partnered with around half a dozen restaurants and other merchants in downtown Mountain View to deliver orders within a two mile radius, KTVU reported at the time.
On Thursday, a dozen restaurants and markets that were displayed in the Starship app for downtown Mountain View appear to no longer be active on the platform.
"Temporarily closed. We're sorry, we cannot deliver from this merchant right now," a message says.
The same message appears for all of the merchants in Modesto and Pleasanton, and at Intuit's Mountain View campus.
The closures in Modesto and Pleasanton were first reported on Wednesday by the Modest Bee.
According to the app, delivery services are still active at several universities across the U.S., including UC Irvine, UCLA, Arizona State University, Bowling Green State University in Ohio, Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts, Georgia Southern University, George Mason University in Virginia and Oregon State University.
There are also listings for services in England, Finland, Estonia and Germany.
In a blog post published earlier this month, the company said it was closing down in "a small number of service locations in the U.S. and Germany" over the next couple of months that "do not have the right mix of merchants and customer base to meet our near-term profitability goals."
The cost-cutting measures also include staff and corporate layoffs, the announcement said. Starship has not disclosed how many people will be impacted. In February, CEO Alastair Westgarth told me that the company employed "many hundreds" of people across Estonia and the U.S.
The company's research and development and manufacturing teams are primarily located in Estonia, Westgarth told me, while operations, finance, accounting, legal, business development and regulatory teams are based in the U.S.
The company was founded in 2014 by Janus Friis and CTO Ahti Heinla. Westgarth joined as CEO in July 2021 after leading the team at Loon, an autonomous satellite internet project under Google's X division, for five years.
“One of the things I thought was amazing about Starship is they figured out how to take this AI/ML driven thing that was an autonomous vehicle and actually get it into commercial operation at scale faster than anybody else had done it,” Westgarth told me after Starship announced its Series B earlier this year.
At that time, he also told me the company was being very deliberate about its growth goals.
“We never just sort of show up and turn the thing on, because we want to be there for a long term… We want to be good partners to the users, to the merchants and the community at large," he said.
The company has raised around $200 million in total funding, including debt. At the beginning of 2022, it announced a $57 million quasi-equity deal from the European Investment Bank which included some debt. And it received around $680,000 through the Paycheck Protection Program in 2020, according to PitchBook.
