Kiwibot wants to cut cars out of the equation when it comes to local deliveries.
On Thursday, the Miami startup announced it closed a $7.5 million pre-series A financing round to grow its fleet of sidewalk robotic delivery vehicles. Kiwibot also entered into $20 million contract with its lead investor, Sodexo, to bring its service to 50 college campuses by the end of the year.
"We have been intensely working in the robotic food delivery field for the last five years, and this funding will allow us to expand the business at the speed that the market is demanding,” said co-founder and CEO Felipe Chávez Cortés.
The company, founded in Colombia, recently opened a new headquarters in Miami. Five of its 130 global employees are currently based in South Florida, but Kiwibot expects that number to grow as its operations scale. The startup aims to add more than 1,200 new robots to its fleet this year, which will all be shipped to Miami before being distributed to other locations, Chávez said.
Kiwibot's last-mile delivery service is already available at college campuses like New Mexico State University, Loyola Marymount University and Gonzaga University in Washington. The partnership with Sodexo, a French food services and facilities company, will help Kiwibot expand to 10 additional campuses this spring and 50 by the end of 2022.
Chávez told the Business Journal there is rising demand for more efficient food delivery options. About 80% of deliveries in the U.S. are made by car and it can cost at least $8 to deliver an item in less an hour, he said. Automated robots can be a more attractive alternative because those devices cut down on the demand for human labor – resulting in lower fees for customers – and reduce unnecessary carbon emissions.
"We must [transition] to a clean technology and make it accessible to everyone, like a college student," he said.
Right now, Kiwibot's biggest challenge is manufacturing thousands of robots at scale to keep up with its expansion goals, he added.
And Kiwibot isn't limited to university campuses. Last year, the startup partnered with the Knight Foundation to bring its delivery service to locations in Miami, Pittsburgh, Detroit and San Jose, California. At the time, Kiwibot said the pilot project would help those cities collect sidewalk infrastructure data and help authorities learn how to best deploy automated robots.
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