Cartken and its diminutive sidewalk delivery robots first rolled into the world with a narrow charter: carrying everything from burritos and bento boxes to pizza and pad thai that last mile to hungry customers.
But the vision — thanks to the startup’s approach to autonomous vehicle technology — was always broader, according to Cartken co-founder and CEO Christian Bersch. From its earliest days, Bersch and the rest of the founding team saw an opportunity for its robots to navigate the outdoor environment of pedestrian-filled sidewalks and the indoor world of factories, labs, industrial buildings and even airports.
The ability for a robot to move between indoors and outdoors seems simple enough. And yet, Bersch says it’s not. It’s here that Cartken and its 30-person strong team is carving out a niche in the ever-evolving autonomous vehicle industry.
Investors appear sold on the possibilities. Cartken has raised $22.5 million in aggregate with $10 million in its latest funding round led by 468 Capital, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. Incubate Fund, deep tech and AI funds LDV Partners and Vela Partners as well as strategic funds from Magna International, Mitsubishi Electric, Shell Ventures and Volex also participated.
The startup, founded in 2019 by former Google engineers behind the Bookbot project, operates a sidewalk delivery bot business on various college campuses, in Miami, Fairfax, Virginia and Tokyo through partnerships with Uber Eats, Grubhub and Mitsubishi Electric. Cartken robots average 36,000 deliveries per month.
Now, it’s bringing the bots inside biotech, pharmaceutical and automotive campuses, including a factory operated by Germany-based ZF. Some of that newly raised capital will be used to scale its more mature sidewalk delivery bot business, which Bersch said is profitable today. The bulk of the funds will be used to “unlock these new (indoor) use cases,” he added.
Cartken co-founder and COO Anjali Jindal Naik noted in a recent interview that they were surprised by the number of companies that have approached the startup in search of robots that can move between indoor and outdoor environments.
“They’ve looked for other solutions, especially ones that go indoor and outdoor, and weren’t really finding them,” she added.
Cartken uses what it describes as a hardware agnostic AI-first approach to autonomy. What that means is a self-driving system that uses a camera-based system — no lidar — that uses AI models, trained on hundreds of thousands of images, to detect objects as well as software algorithms to perceive and navigate the environment. Unlike some other outdoor robots used for delivery, Cartken isn’t reliant on GPS, allowing it to operate indoors. And the robots are made to handle sunlight and rain, pedestrians and uneven ground, all the requirements needed to handle outdoor environments. The self-driving system can also be transferred to different robot form factors and sizes.
The technology is much closer to what you would have in self-driving cars than what you would have in a traditional factory robot, according to Bersch.
In practice, the robots at the ZF factory carry parts that a human technician would previously shuttle via bicycle to other parts of the vast campus.
“That was time lost at the line, Bersch said, noting that it has translated to immediate savings. In 2023, Cartken robots operating at labs and factories in the biotech, pharmaceutical, chemical and automotive sectors saved employees more than 10,000 hours in transportation, according to the company.
Cartken and its diminutive sidewalk delivery robots first rolled into the world with a narrow charter: carrying everything from burritos and bento boxes to pizza and pad thai that last…
Ashwin Nandakumar and Ashwin Jainarayanan were working on their doctorates at adjacent departments in Oxford, but they didn’t know each other. Nandakumar, who was studying oncology, one day stumbled across…
LG has acquired an 80% stake in Athom, a Dutch smart home company and maker of the Homey smart home hub. According to LG’s announcement, it will purchase the remaining…
Fisker has a willing buyer for its remaining inventory of all-electric Ocean SUVs, and has asked the Delaware Bankruptcy Court judge overseeing its Chapter 11 case to approve the sale.…
CoinDCX, India’s leading cryptocurrency exchange, is expanding internationally through the acquisition of BitOasis, a digital asset platform in the Middle East and North Africa, the companies said Wednesday. The Bengaluru-based…
Collaborative document features are being made available inside Proton Drive, further extending the company’s trademark pitch of robust security.
Telegram launched a digital currency called Stars for in-app use last month. Now, the company is expanding its use cases to paid content. The chat app is also allowing channels…
For the past couple of years, innovation has been accelerating in new materials development. And a new French startup called Altrove plans to play a role in this innovation cycle.…
The Indian social media platform Koo, which positioned itself as a competitor to Elon Musk’s X, is ceasing operations after its last-resort acquisition talks with Dailyhunt collapsed. Despite securing over…
Apiday leverages AI to save time for its customers. But like legacy consultants, it also offers human expertise.
Google totally dodges the question of how much energy is AI is using — perhaps because the answer is “way more than we’d care to say.”
SpaceX’s ambitious plans to launch its Starship mega-rocket up to 44 times per year from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center are causing a stir among some of its competitors. Late last…
The situation around a data breach that’s affected an ever-growing number of fintech companies has gotten even weirder. Evolve Bank & Trust announced last week that it was hacked and…
The new bylines go beyond the typical @username references that often accompany link posts from news publications and those pointing to other written content, like a WordPress blog or Substack
code references found in the X iOS app indicate that the company could be considering adding downvotes for replies only to improve how they’re ranked.
Evolve, a popular financial institution for fintech startups, announced that a cyberattack affected “the data and personal information of some Evolve retail bank customers and financial technology partners’ customers.”
Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech! This week, we’re looking at the Evolve Bank hack, three notable acquisitions, Plaid’s enterprise customer growth and more. To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and…
Raising a Series A round in today’s competitive market can be a daunting task. To equip seed-stage founders with the insights and strategies needed for success, TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 will…
Snapchat is introducing new ways for users to personalize their accounts, the company announced on Tuesday. The updates, which are mostly available for Snapchat+ subscribers, allow users to do things…
Meta plans to bring more generative AI tech into games, specifically VR, AR and mixed reality games, as the company looks to reinvigorate its flagging metaverse strategy. According to a…
Featured Article
In the age of generative AI, when chatbots can provide detailed answers to questions based on content pulled from the internet, the line between fair use and plagiarism, and between routine web scraping and unethical summarization, is a thin one. Perplexity AI is a startup that combines a search engine…
23 hours ago
The Make Design feature is available within Figma’s software and will generate UI (user interface) layouts and components from text prompts.
Sophisticated spacecraft often run on shockingly outdated computing systems: consider that the Perseverance rover runs on a PowerPC 750, the processor famous for running on iMacs in the late 1990s. …
The venture fundraising trend in 2024 is fairly clear by now: Large, established VC firms are continuing to attract capital from limited partners, while smaller, newer funds are finding it…
Samyr Laine and Ayanna Alexander-Laine now put their grit and determination to work for founders wanting to launch and scale consumer brands.
Electricity demand is booming on account of AI. In a May 2024 report, Goldman Sachs predicted that data centers will use 8% of the U.S.’s total power supply by 2030, up from…
The amount of waste produced by the construction industry adds up to more than a third of the overall waste produced each year in the European Union. And it’s no…
BoldHue’s device essentially scans your face and dispenses a customized foundation formula that matches your skin tone.
Unacademy is slashing another 250 jobs in latest round of cuts as Indian edtech sector continues to struggle.Q
Apple unveiled iOS 18 last month at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). Since then, the company has released two developer betas in the last few weeks with extended support for…