Starship completes one million offline deliveries
Today, I can proudly announce that we have reached one million autonomous deliveries, more than 6 years after the company was founded in 2014. We believe that no other company in the world has completed so many autonomous deliveries – including self-driving taxis. We also raised an additional $ 17 million and added service to two new campuses, UCLA and the University of Bridgewater, Massachusetts. This new investment brings Starship’s total funding to $ 102 million so far.
We weren’t sure where the 1 million delivery would take place, as there are about 15-20 service areas open worldwide, all with robots delivering every minute. Eventually, it happened in Bowling Green, Ohio, to a student named Annika Keaton, a freshman studying biology for health at BSU. Annika is already part of the history of Starship!
Six years ago, we would not have believed that we would achieve the 1 million delivery in January 2021 – we would like to do it earlier! But it turns out that forcing delivery robots to work with a high degree of autonomy in many countries, around the clock, to make thousands of deliveries a day and millions of miles a year is difficult. Fortunately, we have an incredibly talented team at Starship, to whom I am grateful for making this stage important. It may have taken us 6 years to reach the first million deliveries, but we expect the next million to take only a few months!
Today we also launched UCLA, considered one of the best public schools in the United States, and we supply from restaurants, including Blaze Pizza, Bruin Buzz, Lu Valle and Southern Lights. Bridgewater State University (Massachusetts) also now provides supplies from on-campus restaurants, including Starbucks Cafe and Bears Den.
The additional funding comes at a time of growing interest in the autonomous supply industry. Contactless delivery proved to be one of the most reliable ways to protect vulnerable groups and ensure social distance during the COVID-19 pandemic. We are proud to provide contactless food and grocery deliveries at such a challenging time for so many people. Demand has increased fivefold in neighborhoods since the start of the pandemic.
We continue to see exponential growth since we launched our first commercial delivery service in 2018. Over the past year, Starship has set several new delivery records within the company and expanded to more colleges, including Arizona State University (ASU), University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) and UC Irvine. In addition to opening the service in Mountain View, California, we also began shipping in Modesto, California with our new partner, The Save Mart Companies.
If you are interested in solving difficult challenges and want to have a positive impact on local communities as well as the environment, we would love to hear from you, as we are currently hiring many roles. We plan to increase the Starship team by about 40-50% this year alone. Welcome to 2021!