But deployments refuse to follow a straight line. Serve slashed its forecast as Uber Eats volume fell. London’s robotaxi rollout stalled just weeks after Uber and Wayve celebrated new licenses. Caterpillar sued an aftermarket autonomy startup, and a U.S. government lab began examining whether Chinese lidar presents a security threat. Capital wants to says that physical AI is inevitable; operations, regulators and commercial partnerships say it will still be slow and complicated.

Across the network, we also went deep on why cities may actually want to let robotaxis linger at the curb. And on October 14, we’re bringing the conversation to Texas with the Urban Autonomy Summit in Austin, presented by Nexar. Request an invite to join leaders from across AVs, freight, policy and city transportation.

PARTNER | Premium Rides Are Boosting Uber and Lyft. For How Long?

Premium rides have climbed to 20.1% of observed Uber trips and 8.8% of Lyft’s, up more than 40% on both platforms in two years. That shift is helping the platforms charge more and improve margins, but record driver pay could put those gains under pressure if consumers are less willing to pay more for rides.

• Premium ride share grew 43.5% on Uber and 44.9% on Lyft over the past two years, reaching 20.1% and 8.8% of observed trips.

• Median ride prices rose 10.3% on Uber and 7.1% on Lyft year over year.

• Platform fees grew even faster, rising 14.0% on Uber and 26.4% on Lyft.

• Driver gross pay per trip reached $15.78, up 7.6% year over year and surpassing its 2021 peak for the first time. Bonus pay rose 18.2%, while non-trip incentives jumped 56.2%.

Get the full data, including pricing, fees, premium mix, and driver pay across Uber and Lyft. Download it free → https://gridwise.io/analytics/inside-the-q2-2026-rideshare-economy

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Delivery Robotics, Drones & AVs

• Serve Robotics’ second quarter delivered both growth and a rather large warning light. Revenue reached $3.2 million, up 404% year over year, but the company lost $64.1 million and cut its full-year revenue forecast to $9–10 million after Uber Eats sent it fewer orders. Serve said it is unlikely to renew the partnership beyond early 2027 without a change in the operating model.

• Then came the delivery dramaaaa: Uber sold its entire Serve stake, apparently surprising the company it once incubated inside of Postmates. The dispute centers on order volume, reliability and acceptance rates: Uber worried about Serve’s performance in new markets, while Serve argued Uber’s displayed arrival times left its robots insufficient time to complete trips. More broadly, it was a reminder that Uber controls the demand and customer relationship—even when someone else owns the robot. Serve quickly showed it had other dance partners, launching with Grubhub and Wonder in Chicago, Los Angeles and Alexandria. It also expanded DoorDash deployments to Washington, D.C. and San Jose, opened its first Miami microdepots, introduced an arrival-alert device called Beacon and unveiled Moxi 2.0, a hospital robot with substantially more onboard compute and perception speed. Nothing gets you over a breakup like an extremely busy press release.

• Uber made another big autonomy bet by investing in Zipline and adding its drones to Uber Eats. The first deliveries are expected in existing Zipline markets by the end of 2026, with the companies targeting dozens of U.S. cities and one million drone deliveries per day by the end of 2029. Uber increasingly looks less like a delivery fleet and more like the routing layer for couriers, sidewalk robots, AVs and aircraft alike.

  

• Amazon wants Prime Air to reach nearly 500 U.S. cities and towns by year-end, a sixfold expansion from its current footprint of 11 sites across 10 metro areas. Each location can cover roughly 175 square miles, carrying packages of up to five pounds in as little as 30 minutes. Amazon says more than 60% of frequently purchased items already fit within the system’s size and weight limits.

• Waymo won California approval to expand its commercial territory across 18 counties, more than tripling its permitted footprint around Los Angeles and the Bay Area while clearing the way for service in Sacramento and San Diego. The approval also covers Waymo’s lower-cost Ojai vehicle under an operational domain that permits all times, speeds and weather conditions.

• Just after month-end, Waymo began welcoming public riders in Denver, San Diego and Tampa, bringing fully autonomous passenger service to 14 cities. Denver and San Diego are receiving the weather-ready Ojai minivan, while Tampa begins with Jaguar I-Paces. Access is initially rolling out to people on the waitlist rather than opening to everyone at once.

• Uber and Wayve secured private-hire licenses for 15 supervised robotaxis in London, completing the city’s driver, vehicle and operator licensing requirements. More than 100,000 Londoners reportedly joined the interest list. Yet by month-end, the wider driverless rollout looked unlikely to begin in 2026, as TfL had not issued operator guidance and no company had applied for the new national automated passenger service permit. London’s robotaxi summer lasted approximately three weeks.

• Nevada approved autonomous transportation-network applications for Tesla, Waymo and Uber affiliate Aviari. The permits allow up to 5,000 Tesla vehicles and 1,000 each from Waymo and Aviari in Clark County during their first year. Those figures are regulatory ceilings, not deployment commitments, and airport pickups still require separate authorization.

• Tesla prepared to introduce its purpose-built Cybercab in Austin, initially for employee rides before joining the public network. The two-seat vehicle has no steering wheel or pedals, but Tesla acknowledged it must collect Cybercab-specific driving data before deploying at scale. That caution matters because Tesla’s existing unsupervised fleet remains small compared with Waymo’s operation.

• Gatik raised a $200 million Series D led by the Qatar Investment Authority and Koch Disruptive Technologies. The middle-mile trucking company reports more than $600 million in contracted revenue, 85,000 completed driverless orders and 99% on-time delivery across retail, grocery and CPG routes.

• Bot Auto committed to using exclusively U.S.-based remote assistants. The workers do not drive its autonomous trucks, but can communicate with police, share cargo and route information, activate hazard lights and initiate a shutdown at an officer’s request. The company framed domestic staffing as both an emergency-response measure and a supply-chain resilience commitment.

Humanoids & Physical AI

• XPeng’s humanoid unit, Dogotix, raised more than $900 million at a post-money valuation above $6.3 billion. IDG Capital led the round, with Gaorong, Tencent and Alibaba participating. XPeng described it as the largest single private financing in China’s embodied-AI sector and plans to use the capital for R&D and mass production.

  

• Defense autonomy attracted two more giant checks. Neros raised $250 million at a $2.5 billion valuation to scale autonomous strike drones, counter-UAS interceptors and multi-drone control, with a goal of producing one million aircraft annually by 2028. Terra Industries separately closed a $52 million seed round to expand its African manufacturing base and defense systems, including a 34,000-square-foot drone factory opening in Ghana.

• Spanish drone company FuVeX raised €3 million to expand long-range inspection of electrical networks and pursue dual-use defense applications. The oversubscribed round included Sodena, SEGO Venture and Izertis Ventures, while the company also received a €400,000 public R&D grant.

• FORT Robotics agreed to go public through a SPAC merger with Newbury Street II Acquisition Corp. The deal gives the industrial safety and security company a $556.6 million pro forma enterprise value and includes approximately $31 million in committed financing. If completed, FORT will trade under the ticker FROB. Will this round of spac-a-palooza end any differently than the last one?

• Brussels-based Motion raised a $2 million pre-seed for its Humanoids-as-a-Service model. Rather than asking factories to choose and purchase a robot, Motion bundles hardware selection, training, integration, insurance, compliance and maintenance into one monthly fee. Five Belgian pilots are already training robots to pack containers, load crates and place components on conveyors.

• Korean materials company Unichem agreed to acquire Brooklyn-based Loomia for up to $6.3 million. Loomia embeds flexible circuits in textiles and other soft surfaces, allowing them to sense pressure, temperature and slippage. Unichem hopes to turn that technology into electronic skin for humanoid hands, grippers and outer shells, with its first engineering sample targeted for January 2027.

Fulfillment & Back of House Automation

• Amazon is reportedly exploring “Project Tetromino,” a plan for highly automated last-mile delivery stations. Internal documents described a possible $103 million pilot beginning in 2028, followed by a broader rollout of facilities using AI and robotics to boost throughput.

Construction, Farm & Sourcing Automation

• Caterpillar sued Blue Light Machines for allegedly infringing five patents with its aftermarket autonomy kits. Caterpillar wants sales halted and is seeking triple damages; Blue Light says its system combines long-established open-source drone software with agricultural steering hardware. The startup reports roughly 200 active subscriptions for kits that can automate compactors and articulated dump trucks for $50,000–$60,000. David versus Goliath, except both are operating heavy machinery.

• Gravis Robotics raised a $200 million Series A from SoftBank at a reported $1 billion valuation. The ETH Zurich spinout retrofits excavators and other heavy equipment with hardware and software that can assist an operator or run the machine autonomously. The company called it the largest Series A yet for a construction robotics startup.

Kiosks, Retail & Self-Checkout

• Murphy USA introduced an autonomous “robotic restaurant in a box” from Automated Retail Technologies at select larger-format stores. White Castle is the launch brand, with customers ordering on a touchscreen and receiving hot food in about two minutes. Murphy gets a foodservice offer without building a kitchen or staffing a restaurant; customers get sliders at a gas station. America remains undefeated.

• California Pizza Kitchen and T-ROC Global plan to deploy up to 1,000 automated food machines across 30 U.S. markets over three years. The units can produce a hot pizza in roughly 90 seconds and will also offer pasta, mac and cheese and Butter Cake. Airports, universities, hospitals, hotels, offices, residential buildings and EV charging stations are among the target locations.

  

Industry Trends

• Physical-AI funding reached a record $47.4 billion across 521 deals during the first half of 2026, according to Crunchbase—nearly four times the prior half-year and more than the sector raised during 2022 through 2024 combined. The boom is highly concentrated: Waymo’s $16 billion round represented roughly one-third of the total, followed by multibillion-dollar financings for Anduril, Shield AI and Saronic.

• PitchBook similarly found that mobility-tech deal value surged in the first half, even as deal count declined. It put total investment at roughly $32.1 billion, with autonomy accounting for $20.8 billion—or nearly two-thirds of the category.

  

  
  

• Europe’s sovereign-AI push is increasingly being financed like infrastructure. Italian AI company Domyn reportedly accumulated about $1.1 billion in funding, roughly 90% of it debt, to build its Colosseum supercomputer in southern Italy. UK startup Callosum, meanwhile, raised a $100 million seed round that included the first investment from the UK Sovereign AI Fund. One is building the compute; the other wants to route AI workloads across different chips more efficiently.

• New curbside research suggests cities should sometimes let robotaxis park instead of forcing them to circulate. In a simulation of 1,700 AVs handling 68,000 daily San Francisco trips, banning curb staging increased fleet travel by roughly 60%. The researchers also estimated that staged robotaxis use curb space about eight times more productively than privately parked cars. The empty car at the curb may be annoying; the empty car circling the block is worse.

• A Department of Energy laboratory is reportedly testing Chinese lidar sensors for cybersecurity vulnerabilities. The Idaho National Laboratory review comes as lawmakers consider restrictions on Chinese suppliers including Hesai and RoboSense. Potential concerns include remote disruption, data exfiltration and supply-chain dependence, although no specific exploit or evidence of spying has been publicly identified.

In Other News

Hugging Face’s $399 Microduck sells out in a jiffy. Do you really need a cocktail robot? China’s World Humanoid Robot Games doesn’t exactly make the industry look safe for normies. Deere quarterly income hits $1.38 billion. Manna CEO talks Tulsa expansion. India’s Airbound raises $37M for aerial logistics. Serve Robotics partners with Little Caesars, while Coco and Uber extend partnership to Helsinki. Waymo published its 10 AI insights, while Zoox releases its Safety Case Framework.

These protectionist instincts take different forms — national origin for humanoids, platform access for robotaxis, and an increasing emphasis on homegrown technology from players like MOIA and DoorDash. Physical AI may be global in ambition, but its rules are becoming decidedly local.

Before we dive in: Ottomate also spent July examining how AI, robotics and aerospace pushed venture funding to a new highs and speaking with Wonder about its delivery strategy in: With $650M in Fresh Funding, Wonder Pursues Aerial Ambitions.

Delivery Robotics, Drones & AVs

• Uber is opposing a Washington, D.C. autonomous vehicle bill that would authorize commercial driverless service, arguing that it could displace human drivers and hand Waymo a de facto monopoly. Uber wants operators to participate in hybrid networks containing both AVs and human drivers — a structure that would rather conveniently preserve its place between vehicles and riders. Waymo backs the bill and disputes Uber’s interpretation.

• Waymo reportedly plans to end its exclusive arrangement with Uber in Austin and Atlanta, allowing passengers to book through the Waymo app beginning in 2028. The vehicles may remain available through Uber, but Uber would no longer own the only front door. So much for the happy robotaxi marriage.

• DoorDash secured an FAA Part 135 certificate for DoorDash Air, becoming the eighth operator authorized to run a commercial drone-delivery airline in the U.S. DoorDash says its in-house aircraft was designed and built in America with a majority of U.S.-sourced components — unusually timely details for the spec sheet. Stores participating in one pilot reportedly saw order volume rise about 30% over nine weeks.

  

• MOIA opened its Hamburg robotaxi pilot to passengers, allowing selected residents to book free rides in autonomous Volkswagen ID. Buzz vehicles. The test starts with up to 10 vehicles and safety operators across Winterhude, Barmbek and Wandsbek, with integration into Hamburg’s public-transit app expected to follow.

• Aurora deployed its second-generation driverless trucks across 10 Sun Belt routes. The International LT-based hardware is designed for a one-million-mile service life; Aurora reported nearly 440,000 driverless miles through June, while manufacturing partner Roush is targeting an annual production run rate of 1,000 trucks by year-end.

• Tesla expanded Robotaxi to Orlando and Tampa, adding two more pins to a service map that already includes the Austin, Dallas, Houston and Miami regions. Scale is another matter: Electrek’s analysis of Tesla’s own chart estimates that the fleet completed roughly 900,000 paid miles in both Q1 and Q2, with monthly mileage dropping after April.

• Avride launched delivery robots in Miami with Uber Eats, marking its sixth Uber market and third East Coast location. The company also partnered with Chartwells, bringing Grubhub-booked robot delivery to Bowling Green State University, with more campus rollouts expected this semester.

  

Humanoids & Physical AI

• The FCC added foreign-produced advanced robotic devices and their control components to its Covered List, citing surveillance, supply-chain and remote-commandeering risks. The order blocks new FCC equipment authorizations unless a device receives conditional approval; its broad language could reach quadrupeds, industrial mobile robots and, according to The Verge, certain foreign-made robot vacuums and lawn mowers. The robot trade war may begin in the cleaning aisle.

• Toyota Research Institute spinout Walden Robotics launched with $300 million at a $1.1 billion valuation. Toyota and Deviation Capital co-led the round, joined by Nvidia, Boeing, Samsung and others; Walden says its general-purpose robots have already progressed from pilot to production work at a North American Toyota plant.

  

• Travis Kalanick’s Atoms raised $1.7 billion in an a16z-led round, furthering the consolidation of CloudKitchens and the former City Storage Systems under a broader industrial-AI umbrella spanning food, mining and transportation. While Atoms acquired Anthony Levandowski’s autonomous trucking and mining company Pronto earlier this year, plans to buy parts of Pony AI seem to be DOA. Ben Horowitz explains the broader thesis in “Travis Is Back.”

• UK-based Humanoid raised a $152 million Series A at a $1.35 billion post-money valuation, bringing its total funding to $270 million. The company plans to begin deploying beta robots in Q4, start mass-producing its wheeled platform and expand commercial installations across manufacturing and logistics.

• South Korea’s Holiday Robotics raised $105 million for FRIDAY, its wheeled humanoid for repetitive manufacturing tasks. Holiday is building a broader stack spanning simulation, reusable skills and factory operations, with commercial production targeted for the second half of 2026.

  

• Weave Robotics began taking preorders for Isaac 1, a wheeled household robot designed to pick up laundry, make beds and reset cluttered rooms. Isaac costs $7,999 upfront or $449 per month, with initial California shipments expected this fall. It operates autonomously by default, with teleoperation assistance available when the laundry fights back.

• World Labs acquired SceniX, combining its spatial-intelligence models with SceniX’s simulation and real-world robotics tools. The companies are promising a tighter loop between generated worlds, simulation and physical deployment, with more product details still to come.

Back of House Automation

• Taco Bell is continuing its voice-AI rollout across more than 890 U.S. drive-thrus using technology from Omilia. The system handles ordering while escalating edge cases to employees — an operational deployment, rather than another demo declaring the death of the drive-thru worker.

Kiosks, Retail & Self-Checkout

• Instacart acquired Arpalus, a computer-vision startup that identifies products, prices and shelf conditions with what it says is greater than 95% average accuracy. Instacart plans to combine the technology with data from 600,000 shoppers, Caper carts and fixed cameras to improve inventory visibility across nearly 100,000 stores.

  

• Schnucks is adding an agentic shopping assistant from VitalityIP to its app and website. The assistant will provide meal ideas, nutrition guidance and personalized recommendations while allowing Schnucks to retain its customer data and relationship; launch is expected in late summer.

• Nourish + Bloom opened its fourth autonomous grocery store at Pittsburgh Yards in Southwest Atlanta. The 24/7 location uses app-based entry and camera-powered checkout, received a $600,000 food-access grant and is expected to serve more than 5,000 customers per month. Check out our earlier deep dive on the robotic grocer.
  

• Amazon’s decision to close its remaining Go stores has produced a useful cashierless-retail postmortem. Shoppers like less friction; retailers are less enthusiastic about the sensor density, infrastructure and operational complexity required to remove checkout entirely.

Industry Trends

• European robotics startups raised more during the first six months of 2026 than during the previous two years combined, according to Sifted. Walden, Humanoid and Holiday suggest that physical AI’s funding boom is becoming a multinational arms race, rather than merely another Silicon Valley story.

• Professor Scott Galloway argues that tech is irrationally obsessed with humanoids, overlooking specialized robots already producing revenue in favor of anthropomorphic machines constrained by power, dexterity, training data and reliability. It’s a useful corrective in a month featuring several nine-figure humanoid rounds: the money is real, but general-purpose capability remains a work in progress.

In Other News

Coco Robotics deployed 25 delivery robots in Washington, D.C., initially serving Logan Circle. Bliq won approval to test autonomous cars in Finland, its second European market after Estonia. Tesla says it is developing a wheelchair-accessible autonomous vehicle, although it provided no timeline, specifications or product name. Mobileye will supply cloud-enhanced ADAS for select Stellantis vehicles expected in 2027. Tau launched an invite-only humanoid cleaning service in San Francisco for $30 per hour; each machine is jointly controlled by AI and a remote human operator. Anthropic has reportedly discussed acquiring Physical Intelligence, although neither company has announced a transaction. Kroger debuts AI shopping assistant for meal planning.

Partner | Delivery Insurance Costs Diverge

Insurance costs are eating into delivery and ridehail profitability, but not all markets are created equal. A key regulatory reform is getting delivery costs, in select regions, back on track. Dive deep into the industry trends that can make or break your bottom line with Gridwise Analytics’ 2026 Insurance Fees Report.

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Amsterdam-based Monumental raised a $32 million Series B led by Khosla Ventures to expand its fleet of electric bricklaying robots and enter the U.S. market this year. The company operates as an autonomous subcontractor rather than simply selling machines, using more than 100 robots and its Atrium software platform to apply mortar and position bricks with millimeter-level precision. Monumental says its robots have already helped construct the walls of more than 100 homes, as well as a school, hotel, community center and canal infrastructure across Europe.

Austin-based TerraFirma announced approximately $115 million in funding, including a $100 million Series A led by Kleiner Perkins. Founded by former SpaceX engineers Noah Schochet and Noah McGuinness, the vertically integrated construction company combines AI-assisted planning, remote command centers and semi-autonomous heavy equipment. Excavators, dozers and loaders are retrofitted so skilled operators can control and eventually supervise multiple machines from a screen, with the new funding earmarked for expanding TerraFirma’s engineering, manufacturing and construction operations.

Meanwhile, Santa Fe Springs, California-based Xpanner introduced its X1 Panel Lift, an excavator-based system that transports boxes of photovoltaic modules, picks up individual panels and positions them for installation. The human operator remains in control, while automated vacuum handling, sensor-assisted alignment and a one-button workflow take over the most repetitive lifting and placement tasks. Powered by Xpanner’s Mango controller and a mix of LiDAR, vision and GNSS sensing, X1 is offered through a subscription that includes the equipment, software and on-site support.

Taken together, these announcements show that autonomous construction is developing less as a single breakthrough robot than as a collection of tightly defined, commercially useful workflows. These companies are also wrapping their machines in services, software and human supervision—an acknowledgment that contractors buy completed work and dependable productivity, not autonomy for its own sake. The construction robot revolution may arrive one task at a time, but it is increasingly arriving on real job sites.

The next phase of the company’s growth rests on two things: a rapid expansion across Texas, and the full-scale embrace of delivery automation. PJ Poykayil, Wonder’s Head of Customer Delivery Operations, is the man leading that charge. I caught up with him — two and a half years after our last big interview — to talk about globe-spanning logistics, the company’s new partnership with drone deliverer Zipline, and even what he makes of Grubhub’s long-time robotics partner Starship exiting the college market.

Jonah Bliss: Wonder and Grubhub have been working with autonomous delivery devices - robots and drones alike - for some time now. What makes this Zipline partnership different?

PJ Poykayil: Autonomous delivery, and drone delivery in particular, plays a key role in Wonder’s strategy to make great food more accessible. This technology helps us increase the speed of deliveries and reach areas that traditional delivery methods don’t always serve well.

Zipline is the world’s largest autonomous delivery service, and partnering with an industry leader like that represents a major step forward in our commitment to bringing innovative dining experiences to customers at scale.

To put the scope of Zipline’s operations into perspective, to-date:

• They’ve completed more than 2.5 million autonomous deliveries worldwide. That’s not just across food, but other major sectors like healthcare and retail.

• In the U.S., Zipline currently offers more than 100,000 items available for order today. That’s real scale.

Zipline also has a strong track record of operating in Texas in particular, making them a natural choice for Wonder to collaborate with as part of our upcoming expansion.

This sounds very much like a Texas story: Wonder is actively working on its Dallas-area expansion, while Zipline has made DFW its major market. Will Wonder’s new storefronts be specifically designed around drone deliveries?

This is definitely a Texas story — Texas has long been part of Wonder’s growth roadmap, given the strong alignment between the state’s market dynamics and Wonder’s delivery-first, suburban-friendly model.

As we look ahead to our initial expansion in the Dallas-FW area, we’re starting to build the infrastructure needed to support long-term growth across the state, including storefronts, kitchen operations, advanced logistics, and ordering technology.

All of those investments will also help create the foundation for Wonder’s scalable drone delivery network, and on top of that, Texas has emerged as one of the U.S.’ leading states when it comes to commercial drone operations.

From expansive geography to fast-growing metropolitan areas to a consumer population that traditionally embraces innovation, we’re confident that Texas is an ideal market to build the kind of drone ecosystem that we can grow quickly.

Wonder and Zipline use a multi-step process to identify locations that are well-suited for drone delivery. As part of that, we’re evaluating all of the relevant operational considerations, from landlord approvals and installation requirements, as well as market factors including population density and anticipated order volume.

Partner | Delivery Insurance Costs Diverge

Insurance costs are eating into delivery and ridehail profitability, but not all markets are created equal. A key regulatory reform is getting delivery costs, in select regions, back on track. Dive deep into the industry trends that can make or break your bottom line with Gridwise Analytics’ 2026 Insurance Fees Report.

Download Now

You previously announced a drone partnership with Dexa. What did you learn from that pilot, and what’s different about this new project?

The New Jersey pilot provided valuable insights across delivery speed, restaurant handoff, and the overall customer experience.

We also saw an extremely encouraging response from consumers:

• Roughly 50–60% of eligible customers opted into drone delivery;

• 80% rated their experience a 4 or 5 out of 5;

• And 90% said they would choose drone delivery again.

Customers consistently highlighted the speed, reliability, and ease of the experience, with many describing it as a fun and engaging way to receive their meals.

Importantly, the pilot demonstrated that drone delivery can meaningfully reduce delivery times, particularly at longer distances.

These learnings—combined with key operational insights and site requirements—have directly informed our approach in Texas and give us confidence as we scale the partnership.

Grubhub’s partner Starship recently announced it is leaving the college campus market. How will your robotic operations at universities change for 2027?

Read more

Delivery Robotics, Drones & AVs

• Waymo launched its first nationwide advertising campaign, in the latest sign that autonomous vehicles have gone mainstream. The ads are meant to highlight Waymo’s safety record, while encouraging consumers to rally to bring AV service to their locales.

• Talk about a big pivot for delivery bots… Starship Robotics is pulling out of the college campus market, as it refocuses its efforts on supermarket deliveries. While the company had long focused on groceries in Europe, its American operations were centered around 60+ universities; already schools like NCAT are transitioning to new operators. Expect Robot.com and Avride to pick up many of these contracts. Starship currently handles about 1 in 5 grocery deliveries in Finland; CEO Ahti Heinla explained:

“Campus and grocery are fundamentally different operations: One is seasonal and contract-driven, the other is a 365-day urban business requiring different infrastructure, different retail partnerships and a different go-to-market approach,” Heinla said in a written statement to Food On Demand. “The robots transfer; the operational model does not. That’s why we’re focusing where the opportunity is greatest, and for us, that’s grocery.”

• Self-driving trucks are bubbling up! PepsiCo signed a new multi-year partnership with Gatik. The AV co’s class eight trucks will ramp up logistics operations in Texas, Arizona and Arkansas.

• Irish drone startup Manna pulled out of home country after regulators held up necessary permits.

• Food technology platform Wonder is teaming up with aerial logistics platform Zipline, bringing on-demand drone delivery to Texas. Starting in January 2027, customers will be able to order meals, delivered via drone, from select Dallas-area locations. By the end of 2027, Wonder hopes to make drone delivery available from the majority of the 100+ locations its building across Texas.

  

• Taxi app Go pulled off Japan’s largest IPO of the year, raising ¥88.6 billion ($553 million) at an approximately $1.16B valuation. The company, which already partners with Waymo, plans to spend about $50M on robotaxi expansions and acquisitions.

• Aseon Labs just raised $10M, in a seed round led by Crane Venture Partners and with participation by Y Combinator and mobility heavyhitters from the likes of Uber, Turo, Nuro and Zimride. The company hopes to build and deploy robotic pods that can be placed in underutilized urban parking spots, letting AV fleets perform charging and cleaning in a more decentralized fashion.

  

• Tesla expanded its Robotaxi service to near Miami, beginning safety validation in the low-rise suburbs of West Miami and Coral Terrace.

Humanoids & Physical AI

• Standard Robotics raised $200 million, as it aims to onshore robotics manufacturing. The Series C round values the company at over $1 billion; capital will go towards scaling a manufacturing facility in Glen Cove, NY.

• Prometheus raised $12 billion, at a whopping $41B valuation. The company, which counts Jeff Bezos as a co-CEO, is developing AI tools to help engineers more quickly create physical products.

• Robot.com, fka Kiwibot, launched the R-noid, a wheeled humanoid geared towards augmenting repetitive tasks like restaurant assistance, packing, folding and hosting.

• Agility Robotics, maker of the Digit bipedal robot, plans to go public via SPAC. Agility, which has deployed robots to nine sites, hope to raise $620 million at a $2.5B valuation. We’ll see if this works out any better than the last wave of SPACs…

• Automaking giant BMW has deployed Figure’s model 03 humanoid to its manufacturing facilities in South Carolina. Figure 03 sports a number of upgrades over previous models: tactile-sensor hands, wireless charging, palm cameras and speech synthesis.

• Niantic Spatial updated its Scaniverse software, allowing users to turn a 360° video capture into a sim-ready USDZ file by combining a Gaussian splat with an automatically generated mesh.

Back of House Automation

• Amazon has updated its Vulcan robot, giving the arm the sense of touch. The ecommerce giant is now deploying these machines to fulfillment centers across Europe, with the U.S. to follow.

  

• Remember Zume? While the robotic pizza maker folded over three years ago, evidently its IP is still worth something. Pasadena, CA-based Miso, maker of Flippy (and frequent crowdfunding promoter) just acquired Zume’s technology and intellectual property, including its hardware, software and hundreds of patents.

  

Farm & Sourcing Automation

• What went wrong at Monarch Tractor? The autonomous farm equipment manufacturer raised over $500 million, with dreams of automating and electrifying tasks on vineyards and farms. The Los Angeles Times has a deep-dive post-mortem, noting that much of the tech fell short of promises, leading dealers to sue the company over misrepresentation.

Kiosks, Retail & Self-Checkout

• Instacart brings its Caper Carts to Weis Markets, taking cart-powered self-checkout to a ~200 unit chain based in Pennsylvania.

• Rhode Island passed a new law — S. 2342/H. 7290 — mandating that stores keep at least one worker on staff for every three self-checkout kiosk.

Industry Trends

• North American venture funding hit a new high — $392 billion in the first half of 2026 — buoyed by investments into AI, defense and robotics.

  

In Other News

Why Krispy Kreme can’t automate its donuts. Avride sidewalk bots complete 600,000 deliveries, as company goes live in Arlington, VA. CargoX raises $250M for autonomous deliveries, helmed by former CEO of Talabat. Nebius launches Physical AI Living Lab, bringing Nvidia tech to Europe. Decart launches Oasis 3, to simulate driving data. Waymo releases new driving benchmark. Lyft Flexdrive takes over Waymo operations in Nashville. Stellantis, Wayve and Uber partner on robotaxis. NTSB probes fatal Tesla Autopilot crash. CaoCao and May Mobility partner to bring robotaxis to Europe. DoorDash Dot bot rolls into active SWAT scene. Proception raises $11M for robotic hands, after settling lawsuit with Tesla. Serve Robotics works with local artists to adorn bots. Acodyne raises €2.5M for autonomous cargo drones. Grocery Outlet picks Afresh’s AI to optimize supply chains. China hits 10k robovans deployed. Hyphen and Motoniq partner to bring physical AI to food automation. Waymo launches loyalty program. Zoox upgrades robotaxi hardware. NHTSA looks to revise robotaxi brake pedal rules. Momenta Global seeks Hong Kong IPO.

PARTNER | Why It Doesn’t Have to Be Humans vs. Machines

A new report makes the case for a hybrid autonomous vehicle network that gives cities time to plan, protects workers from sudden displacement, and keeps service available beyond the wealthiest zip codes.

Learn More

Delivery Robotics, Drones & AVs

• VW-owned MOIA began on-road testing of its ID.Buzz robotaxis in Los Angeles, while concurrently partnering with Beep to scale its vehicles into new shared transit operations, starting in Orlando.

  

• Matternet raised $33 million as part of a reverse-merger taking the drone startup public. Check out our recent interview with Founder & CEO Andreas Raptopoulos.

• In other financial news: China’s WeRide saw Q1 revenue climb 58% YoY to $16.5 million, while Serve Robotics’ Q1 was up 578% YoY to $3 million.

• Texas regulators revealed the size of various AV fleets operating in the Friendship State: Waymo has 577, Avride has 317, Nuro has 47 and Tesla’s got 42.

• Marketplace took a look at the new jobs being created as companies like Starship expand robotic deliveries across college campuses. We were delighted to help facilitate this introduction at Curbivore 2026!

• Vancouver, British Columbia approved Serve Robotics’ application for a six-month trail of its sidewalk delivery bots. This is the first Canadian jurisdiction to approve the technology; Toronto previously banned another PDD upstart.

• British self-driving tech player Wayve is taking its AV stack into new privately-owned vehicles, as it signed a deal with Stellantis, starting with North American brands like Dodge and Chrysler.

• Connect with Detroit’s top AV innovators next Tuesday at our Urban Autonomy Summit Detroit. RSVP now — limited spots still available.

Humanoids & Physical AI

• 1X began production of its NEO humanoid at its factory in the San Francisco suburb of Fremont. The 58,000 sq. ft. facility, combined with another in the works, can produce 10,000 units per year.

• Meta purchased humanoid startup Assured Robot Intelligence, slotting the team into its Superintelligence Labs research division.

• Config, a Korean / Californian startup building data layers for robotics foundation models, raised a $27M seed round from Samsung Venture Investment, Hyundai Motor’s investment arm ZER01NE Ventures, LG Technology Ventures and SKT America.

• Mind Robotics, raised $400M, led by Kleiner Perkins. The Rivian-spinout’s total capital raised now exceeds $1 billion.

• London-based Humanoid announced a partnership with Bosch to scale production and distribution of its machines across Europe.

• Nvidia revealed its Cosmos 3 open frontier foundation model.

Back of House Automation

• Vori raised $22M, led by Cherryrock Capital, to create an “operating system for the world’s grocery stores.”

• Arc raised $10.8 million from a16z to create autonomous drive-thru order collection systems.

• Some picnics end in tears… pizza robot innovator Picnic just shut down, after having raised $50M+ over the course of a decade (including $5M in late 2024.) Check out our conversation with former CEO Clayton Wood.

Farm & Sourcing Automation

• Autonomous tractor and de-weeding startup Carbon Robotics was named number 22 on CNBC’s list of 50 most disruptive companies.

Kiosks, Retail & Self-Checkout

• Cantaloupe, the maker of various unattended retail solutions, was purchased by 365 Retail Markets, in a transaction valued at $848 million.

• Tally’s grocery inventory-checking robots look to be heading to Kroger markets around Indianapolis.

Industry Trends

• Humanoid funding is hitting new records, with 2026’s year-to-date haul — $5.1 billion — already exceeding last year’s total investments.

  

• China-specific robotics funding is also looking strong, with startups raising $3.3 billion across 126 deals.

In Other News

South Korea trains humanoid to be Buddhist monk. D.C. begins crafting local regulations for AV operations. Watch self-driving Teslas struggle to travel between service centers near Houston. Aurora Innovation partners with McLane. Kodiak AI raises $100M at a discount, crashing its stock price. Waymo does software recall of 3,791 vehicles due to flooding issues, followed by pause of freeway operations. May Mobility partners with ECARX. Nuro expands in Germany. Waymo opens new Ojai vehicles to passengers. Defense funding surges, in a boon to many SoCal-based startups. Regulators probe Avride after crashes. Keeta began drone deliveries in Dubai. Meet Chipotlai Max: the open-source AI project that lets you code using various restaurant and retail chains’ chatbots’ LLM tokens.

In the most recent edition of the Zag Talk, Jonah Bliss chats with Ani and Darius, as they get into why they think this is the moment that robotaxis truly take off. And the three of them dive into the tricky downstream effects that could come along for the ride: would cheaper mobility just mean endless congestion? Are voters and policymakers ready for these sorts of massive changes? Listen in!

PARTNER | Rising Fuel Costs Are Squeezing Gig Driver Earnings

Rideshare and delivery drivers are now spending 32–39% more of their gross pay on fuel than a year ago — the highest share since 2022. Platform relief programs are covering only a fraction of the gap, leaving drivers to absorb the shock through lower take-home pay.

• Rideshare drivers’ fuel share of pay rose 32% to 17.4% in Q1 2026 — the highest level since 2022

• Delivery drivers saw an even sharper 39% increase, with fuel claiming 15.6% of gross earnings over the same period

• Only 17.4% of Uber Eats workers received any gas-related payout the week of March 30; DoorDash’s maximum $15 weekly payout offsets only a fraction of the estimated $20–$30 in incremental weekly fuel costs for a full-time driver

Get the full data — including platform-by-platform breakdowns and what this means for driver supply — in Gridwise’s latest report.

Download It for Free

Zag Talk Brings You The World’s Top AV, Robotics & Mobility Experts

The Curbivore

This Fighter Pilot Knows Why Autonomous Machines Shouldn't Settle for Anything Less Than Perfection

There’s nothing worse than an almost perfect machine. If a self-driving car misbehaves consistently, users will know not to trust it. But if it works right 99.99% of the time, by the time it fails, most lazy humans will have given up on closely monitoring it. Professor Missy Cummings knows exactly how high those stakes can be — having famously served as…

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5 months ago · 3 likes · Jonah Bliss

The Curbivore

Lyft’s Not Content With Second Place in the Robotaxi Race

As robotaxis race towards becoming a regular part of our mobility landscape, it at first looked like Lyft had no interest in joining the competition, instead letting deep pocketed competitors like Waymo and Uber push ahead (while wisely avoiding the costly mistakes that took down others like Cruise and Argo AI.) But in the past year, the pink mustache h…

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10 months ago · 2 likes · Jonah Bliss

The Curbivore

Introducing Zag Talk - Coco's Zach Rash Shares Path to Global Expansion

Your favorite mobility and delivery podcast is back, but with a whole new twist! Jonah Bliss and Greg Lindsay have teamed up with Zag Daily to bring you Zag Talk, bringing you fresh news, in-depth interviews and witty analysis every two weeks…

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a year ago · 1 like · Jonah Bliss

The Curbivore

AVs & Narrative Command, Investing in the Future of Mobility With Alex Roy

Alex Roy knows two things — how the mobility world works, and how to tell a damn good story. On the first front, he established himself on the legendary Cannonball Run race, held the record for fastest lap around Manhattan and served as Director of Special Operations for Argo AI. On the latter, he chaired the board of storytelling org The Moth, co-found…

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2 years ago · 4 likes · Jonah Bliss and Greg Lindsay

Delivery Robotics, Drones & AVs

• Waymo dominated the California DMV’s 11th annual testing data release, as the Alphabet-backed AVer logged over 3.3 million miles in the Golden State in 2025. California has also updated its AV regulations, changing reporting requirements, allowing heavy duty trucks onto public roads and creating a mechanism to ticket misbehaving vehicles.

  

• DoorDash and Wing expanded their drone delivery partnership, now covering consumers who live near Tanger Outlets Locust Grove, on the outskirts of Atlanta.

• Travis Kalanick’s Atoms, fka City Storage Systems / CloudKitchens, officially acquired Pronto. This reunites the Uber founder with Anthony Levandowski, who co-founded Google’s self-driving car program, before being indicted with theft of trade secrets.

• Starship expanded its partnership with Just Eat, now covering Barnsley, a tech-oriented town between Leeds and Manchester. Meanwhile, Avride began mapping for delivery service in Arlington, VA.

• Relatedly, Starship just dropped off its 10 millionth delivery, as it operates 3,000+ bots in 300+ locations across eight countries. Collectively, it’s driven over 22 million kilometers (13.7 million miles.) Growth seems to be steady state, as the company announced nine million last October, and eight million in April 2025.

  

• Tesla expands its human-operated “Robotaxi” network to Houston and Dallas, starting with very small geo-fences.

• Flytrex is expanding its partnership with Little Caesars, launching its new, larger Sky2 drone, capable of delivering two large pizzas plus soda and sides (up to 8.8 lbs total.) Sky2 can travel up to four miles, and is thus far averaging four and a half minutes from takeoff to delivery. The two companies have been working together since early 2023; this expanded partnership is first starting in Wylie, Texas, before expanding to additional sites in the DFW Metroplex. While orders are placed via the Flytrex app, the two companies have also launched a direct integration into the pizza maker’s ordering system to further speed up deliveries.

• Zipline is also doubling-down on the chain-filled sprawl of North Texas, as it adds brands like Hawaiian Bros, Blaze Pizza and Little Caesars (wow, the emperor is getting awfully promiscuous with his drone providers…) Zipline’s center of operations is in Rowlett, a town directly north of Wylie: talk about busy airspace!

• Avride offers a tour of its delivery bot assembly line, as it nears 1,000 robots produced.

  

Humanoids

• Industrial giant Siemens began testing Humanoid’s HMND 01 Alpha, having the bot autonomously perform logistics tasks at a German factory.

  

• Andy Rubin’s Genki Robotics hit unicorn status, valued at around $1 billion following its hot Series A.

• Faraday Future finishes certification of its FX Aegis, Futurist and Master humanoids and quadruped bots.

• Unitree’s humanoids are on-site at Tokyo Haneda airport, assisting with luggage handling amid a labor shortage.

  

Back of House Automation

• Appetronix acquired Cibotica, as the Donato’s Pizza-backed robotic pizzeria branches into salads and bowls.

  

• Chef Robotics made its 100 millionth meal serving, creating what the company claims is the world’s largest real-world food manipulation dataset and more in-production deformable material training data than any other physical AI startup.

Kiosks, Retail & Self-Checkout

• Ottomate News went on site to the National Automatic Merchandising Association’s big annual show: see the machines that caught our eyes.

Industry Trends

• Venture fund Eclipse just raised $1.3 billion in new capital, half for early-stage and half for growth-stage startups, with an eye for robotics and physical AI startups.

• Meet 2026’s foodtech unicorns.

In Other News

OpenAI mulls spinning out robotics, hardware divisions. How the Pentagon got hooked on AI-powered war machines. Quack: Avride runs over beloved duck in Austin park. Indigo’s Go Bots, formerly made by Clevon, head to Belgium. Mappedin raises $24.5M for indoor mapping. Philly attacks Uber Eats / Avride bots. Uber committing $10 billion to robotaxis, partners with Hertz to launch Oro. Coco expands to San Jose, CA, partners with BlindSquare. Pudu raises nearly $150 million, at a $1.5B+ valuation. Tesla Robotaxi prices jump 41%. Zoox begins testing service at Las Vegas airport. Rocsys raises $13 million for autonomous charging. Serve Robotics’ LA-area fleet hits 500 bots. Einride files registration statement for SPAC. China suspends AV permits after Baidu outage.

Cantaloupe Smart Aisle

Amazon may be giving up on its checkout-free shopping, but Cantaloupe sure isn’t. While the brand has a number of smaller solutions for unattended retail, its Smart Aisle paints the biggest picture: 3D cameras, AI and shelf scales track all the goods and customers, billing visitors as soon as they walk out.

Mr. R Micro Robotic Convenience Store

Why not stick a six-axis arm in a vending machine? That seems to be the eye-catching concept behind the Mr. R Micro Robotic Convenience Store, which just landed from Singapore. While it may not be the most space efficient, the 12 3/4 x 7 1/2 foot box is also festooned with screens, making it sure to garner attention from passersby looking for a novel shopping experience. It feels like scaled down version of VenHub.

Qarm Robotic Barista

Does the world need another coffee bot? While the folks at Hestia and Cafe X might not welcome the competition, Qarm is making its way stateside, in a move that is sure to put more downward pricing pressure on the overall concept.

Wonderfil

Sometimes the best concepts are the simplest ones. Wonderfil takes the familiar mechanics of pouring a pint of beer and applies it to personal care items, helping cut down on waste at markets, colleges and hotels. Founder Amelia Eichel gave us a hands-on tour, below.

Delivery Robotics, Drones & AVs

• Waymo had a rough optics cycle: one robotaxi blocked EMS during an Austin mass shooting response, while the NTSB is now officially investigating a vehicle passing a stopped school bus due to remote operator error.

• And yet scale keeps climbing. Waymo ridership is spiking, Zoox is expanding to Austin and Miami, and Uber is hedging with both Zoox and Wayve/Nissan.

  

• Policy is moving in both directions. The Feds are exploring fully driverless vehicles without controls, Virginia is targeting 2028 deployments, while California is tightening scrutiny over remote operators.

• Tesla’s autonomy stack looks more hybrid than advertised, with reports of remote human intervention in robotaxis and broader safety concerns resurfacing from AV experts.

• On delivery, DoorDash is launching Dot in the Bay Area ‘burb of Fremont, while Coco is improving localization through Niantic Spatial. Avride robots are now showing up near Philly too (good luck!)

• Serve Robotics continues scaling, launching White Castle delivery and reporting thousands of robots in-market — though collisions with bus shelters show the edge cases are still very real.

• Drones keep stacking momentum. Wing is expanding into the SF Bay Area, Manna raised $50 million, and Zipline pulled in another $200M.

• Grubhub is also finally leaning into drones, teaming up with Dexa in New Jersey.

• WeRide keeps expanding globally, launching in Slovakia and Singapore with Grab.

Humanoids

• China’s physical AI push is starting to look industrial. Time argues China is pulling ahead, while Unitree filed for a $610M IPO after scaling shipments and improving margins.

• Amazon is reportedly acquiring humanoid developer Fauna Robotics, right after gobbling up RIVR.

  

• Meanwhile, OpenAI’s robotics lead resigned over Pentagon-related concerns, a reminder that embodied AI quickly runs into governance questions.

Back of House Automation

• Simbe’s Tally became the first retail robot to achieve UL 3300 certification, removing a key blocker for broader in-store deployment.

• Instacart is pushing a “physical AI” retail stack built around Caper Carts and data integration, turning stores into sensor networks as much as storefronts.

  

  Catch Instacart’s Head of Product John Adams at Curbivore 2026!

Kiosks, Retail & Self-Checkout

• Costco has been using self-checkout machines since 2013, but the retail giant is now reportedly phasing them out, to be replaced with a “Scan and Go” experience.

Industry Trends

• Rivian spinout Mind Robotics raises $500M.

• Startup unicorns are back on the rise, pushed up by massive rounds for physical AI and robotics startups like BedRock Robotics and Spirit AI.

  

In Other News

Momenta files for IPO. VeryAI raises $10M for palm-based ID verification. Lucid Motors shows off Lunar robotaxi. Meet the people strapping cameras to their heads to train robots. Travis Kalanick launches Atoms. Ottobot heads to Australian mine town. DoorDash invests into Also. Starship launches at Florida Polytechnic University. China cracks down on drones. Avride hits 4,600 orders at Salisbury University. Glendale, CA calls for moratorium on delivery robots.

We’re two weeks away from Curbivore 2026 — returning to the Downtown LA Arts District on April 16th and 17th — and we’ve got a special perk for Ottomate Pro subscribers like yourself: complimentary admission!

Read more

At the center is founder and CEO Andreas Raptopoulos, who’s been building toward this moment since 2011, back when drones were still synonymous with military uses or hobbyist tinkering. In the conversation below, we unpack Matternet’s evolution from humanitarian logistics to urban delivery platform, why he rejects the hub-and-spoke model, how the unit economics work, and what it might take for drones to move from novelty to everyday utility.

Jonah Bliss: Let’s start at a high level, what’s the Matternet story?

Andreas Raptopoulos: In 2010, I came across what was happening in the DIY drone space. I came into the space with a question, “has something changed in the technology landscape that would allow us to build a different kind of flying vehicle?”

As I started thinking through what was happening, I realized there was a DIY drone movement building up. People were taking sensors popularized through smartphones, computers, GPS units, and creating these tiny quadcopters that could aviate and navigate by themselves.

When I saw that, I thought: this is going to change how the world does transportation—for goods and eventually for people.

That led me to start Matternet in 2011. We were among the first companies to talk about drones as a civilian tool. Back then, drones were mostly associated with the military.

We started by asking: where could this have immediate impact? These systems weren’t permitted in the U.S. or Europe yet—but there were places in the world with no transportation infrastructure at all. So we focused on those.

We did projects in Haiti and the Dominican Republic in 2012, then Bhutan and Papua New Guinea in 2014, and later Malawi. We worked with organizations like Doctors Without Borders, the World Health Organization, and UNICEF.

The idea was leapfrogging: in places without roads, could you skip straight to aerial transport—like how cellular skipped landlines?

For the first few years, up until 2014, we focused entirely on humanitarian work. I gave a talk in 2013—“If there are no roads, there’s a drone for that”—and that really became how people understood what we were doing.

But eventually, I realized humanitarian funding wouldn’t be enough. It was clear we’d need something like $100M+ to build the full technology stack. So we pivoted to commercial use cases.

We entered Switzerland in 2015 and started working with regulators and Swiss Post to figure out how to safely operate drones over cities.

We knew that about 80% of last-mile delivery happens in urban and suburban areas. And something like 85–86% of Amazon shipments are under 2 kg.

So the question became: how do we build a system that regulators and the public trust in those environments?

In 2017, we became the first company approved to fly over cities in Switzerland. We focused first on healthcare—transporting diagnostics, lab samples, and medicines between facilities.

If you look at a system like UCSF, there are dozens of locations moving samples and materials all day. If you can reduce that to 5–10 minutes, it changes efficiency and patient outcomes significantly.

We’ve always been told BVLOS is just around the corner…

Yeah, exactly. And now it finally is here.

We partnered with UPS in 2019 and launched the first commercial drone delivery service in the U.S. A lot of people were doing pilots at the time—but this was a real operation.

Our philosophy is different from most. We don’t want to be UPS—we want to be Apple or Tesla. We want to build the machines and systems that others operate.

So with UPS, we provided the full stack: the drones, the ground infrastructure, and the software. They operated the system.

Then COVID hit, and BVLOS timelines slipped.

But in 2022, we became the first—and still the only—company with a drone delivery system type-certified by the FAA. That process took four and a half years.

About 14 months ago, we launched our first home delivery product. Up until then, we were only doing B2B healthcare. Now we’re expanding into food and retail.

Can you talk a bit about the unit economics, especially outside of healthcare?

In healthcare, we already have positive unit economics. Customers are willing to pay $20+ per delivery, depending on the market.

For food delivery, the target is different. We believe we can get costs well below $5 per delivery, while customers are willing to pay $6–$8.

To get there, a few things matter:

• You need volume—around 100 deliveries per day per location

• You can’t have people on-site operating drones

• You need low-cost, high-utilization aircraft

Think of it in terms of cost per flight hour. If an aircraft costs $20,000 and runs for 10,000 hours, that’s $2 per hour. If you can do 5–8 deliveries per hour, you’re looking at around $0.40 per delivery just for the aircraft.

Then you layer in batteries, real estate, supervision, and maintenance.

What does supervision look like?

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Delivery Robotics, Drones & AVs

• Amazon Prime Air launched in Kansas City, Kansas, moving packages of up to 5 pounds to destinations within 7.5 miles of its fulfillment center eight miles west of downtown. (See map.)

• Just Eat and Starship are launching a collaboration, partnering on delivery robotics in the United Kingdom. The two companies are initially launching in Sunderland, a town of 288,000 in Northeastern England.

  

• Delivery drone startup Manna is partnering with Uber Eats to launch in Ireland, followed by an expansion to other EU markets. This is Uber’s first drone partner in the European Union.

• Speedbird Aero raised $5.8 million to expand drone deliveries in Brazil, with funders including local 3PD iFood.

• Waymo had a huge month: launches in Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Orlando; hitting 200 million autonomous miles driven; beginning tests in Chicago; and starting deployments of its sixth-generation Driver technology.

• Uber also made the case for why it — and not players like Waymo or Zoox — could win the long-term AV race. In a supplement to its 2025 earnings, the company noted it performed better in markets where it launched robotaxi services, while also beating its competitors’ purported benchmarks. The ridehail giant is also investing $100M in new robotaxi charging infrastructure, while debuting its Autonomous Solutions division.

  

• In other AV news: Senate Republicans push the SELF DRIVE Act forward; Bedrock Robotics raised $270M for autonomous excavators; Zoox began testing in Columbus, Ohio; Tesla’s Robotaxi network seems to be driving 4x worse than humans; Aurora’s autonomous trucks are hitting the highways between Arizona and Texas; Wayve raised $1.2 billion.

Humanoids

• LimX raised $200 million in Series B funding, with backing from Stone Venture, JD, and Oriental Fortune Capital. The Chinese startups’s Tron 1 biped retails for $15k and can purportedly ski.

  

• Is this an arms race?! Austin-based Apptronik has raised $520 million, at a $5B+ valuation. Backers include B Capital, Google, Mercedes-Benz, John Deere and the Qatar Investment Authority. This extension of their earlier round brings their total Series A funding to just shy of $1 billion.

Back of House Automation

• After just three months in service, Amazon is pulling the plug on project Blue Jay, a multi-armed robot meant to facilitate same-day orders. The company will instead focus on its lower-cost Orbital platform.

• Walmart Data Ventures launched Scintilla In-Store, a platform for supplier field reps that connects data streams to in-store actions.

• Burger King is piloting an AI chatbot — codenamed Patty and powered by OpenAI — in employee headsets at select locations.

Farm & Sourcing Automation

• With immigrant farm workers being cruelly forced out of the country, America’s big agriculture companies are facing a labor shortage, and they in turn are turning to robots to keep cows milked and crops picked.

Kiosks, Retail & Self-Checkout

• VenHub’s CEO announced the autonomous vending company is planning to file a direct listing on the Nasdaq, as a former exec from Amazon’s Just Walk Out project has joined the company. See our earlier review of VenHub’s mechanical mini-mart.

• Burger chain White Castle is getting into kiosks, partnering with Evolvending and Just Baked to bring its microwaved sliders to airports in Florida and Massachusetts.

  

Industry Trends

• Do too many robotics startups rely overly heavily on crowdfunding investors? Hunterbrook did a deep dive into the phenomenon, noting how less sophisticated investors can be suckered into backing companies with slim track records and scant operations. While the report specifically mentions Miso Robotics, we’ve seen many other companies in this sector rely on similar tactics.

In Other News

Learning from Zipline’s failures and successes. Hyundai’s making a $26B bet on robots and America. Meet Hyundai’s MobED robotics platform. Hesai and Grab collaborate on lidar. Alibaba launches open source RynnBrain. Ukrainian dual-use drones deliver cookies and perform combat. Toyota and Pony.ai start production of bZ4X robotaxi. Avride gets into ads. ODOT trials autonomous crash trucks to protect road workers. Teledyne FLIR debuts Lepton XDS thermal + visual camera. DoorDash launches Gemini for Android integration. LA Times looks at Next Robot. Can radar be used for end-to-end autonomy? Everyware restaurant self-checkout kiosks head to Hong Kong. Do healthcare drones pass the ROI smell test?

Coco Robotics Launches Coco 2 Delivery Bot

Los Angeles-based delivery bot biggie Coco Robotics revealed its new Coco 2 robot, at an exclusive event near Venice Beach, late last week. The larger robot features much-improved autonomy, IPX6 weather resilience (a vital factor for a company operating in both Miami and Helsinki) and the ability to operate on streets, bike lanes and sidewalks. While Coco has long prioritized lean and affordable hardware, the new version — which costs “around 10% of a car” — definitely has some higher-end additions, including an air blade on its cameras, heated glass and a hardware keypad for unlocking the storage compartment.

Hardware & Road Map Analysis

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PARTNER | Autonomous Vehicle Impact Report

Early AV deployments may be reducing driver utilization and pressuring pay—here’s what the data shows.

The 2026 Autonomous Vehicles Impact Report compares AV-active cities to nationwide benchmarks to identify early changes in driver productivity and earnings as autonomous fleets expand.

Our findings include:

• Trips per hour declined nearly 2× faster in AV-active cities than nationwide

• Hourly gross pay fell in Los Angeles (-3.7%), Phoenix (-0.4%), and San Francisco (-1.7%) while growing 1.8% nationwide

• S&P Global projects AVs need pricing near $1 per mile to scale—and parity isn’t expected until ~2040–2041

Download the full report to understand how AVs may be impacting human drivers today—and what these early signals could mean next.

Download the Report

Delivery Robotics, Drones & AVs

• People love delivery bots! New data from Starship Robotics shows that 97% of students love or like the company’s machines. Starship served 65 university campuses in 2025, traveling 1.5 million miles.

  

• Waymo just raised a whopping $16 billion, valuing the AV leader at $126 billion. Alphabet remains the majority investor, with additional funding led by Dragoneer Investment Group, DST Global, and Sequoia Capital. Waymo has now driven 127 million autonomous miles, while providing 15 million rides in 2025 alone.

• Serve Robotics acquired Diligent Robotics, maker of Moxi The Robot — with a focus on healthcare applications. The acquisition was for $29 million, while Diligent had previously raised around $100M.

• Tesla claims to be making progress with its Austin, Texas-based Robotaxi pilot, as the company has removed the safety drivers from the car’s front seat. Internet sleuths counter that the company is actually still using safety drivers, however, they’ve simply been moved to a second, trailing vehicle.

• Medium-duty AV trucking player Gatik launched commercial operations, handling daily deliveries for Fortune 50 retailers in Texas, Arkansas and Arizona. The Mountain View, CA-based company now has $600 million plus in contracted revenue.

Humanoids

• Israeli AV tech player Mobileye is getting into the humanoid space, with the acquisition of Mentee Robotics, for approximately $900 million in stock and cash. Mentee’s focused on a human-to-robot mentoring plus few-shot learning powered approach.

• X Square Robot completed its Series A++ funding round, raising RMB 1 billion ($140M USD) for its wheeled humanoids and zero shot-based learning approach “robot brain.”

• 1X Technologies released a new world model for its NEO line of robots, allowing the humanoid to learn new tasks by watching online videos. (Better keep those bots off of TikTok!)

• NYC-based Fauna Robotics unveiled Sprout, a “robot you want to be around,” built for a developer audience.

  

• Too many humanoids?! Market research firm Gartner predicts that by 2028, under 100 companies will progress humanoid robots beyond experimentation, with less than 20 companies going live in production for supply chain and manufacturing uses. “The promise of humanoid robots is compelling, but the reality is that the technology remains immature and far from meeting expectations for versatility and cost-effectiveness,” said Abdil Tunca, Senior Principal Analyst in Gartner’s Supply Chain practice.

Back of House & Logistics Automation

• Amazon acquired truck and trailer unloading startup Rightbot, folding the startup into Amazon’s Robotics Delivery and Packaging Innovation (RDPI) team. While terms were not disclosed, Amazon previously invested $4 million into the startup’s seed round, attracted to the company’s approach to unstructured unloading.

  

Farm & Sourcing Automation

• Caterpillar partnered with NVIDIA. “As AI moves beyond data to reshape the physical world, it is unlocking new opportunities for innovation — from job sites and factory floors to offices,” said Caterpillar CEO Joe Creed. “Caterpillar is committed to solving our customers’ toughest challenges by leading with advanced technology in our machines and every aspect of business. Our collaboration with NVIDIA is accelerating that progress like never before.”

Kiosks, Retail & Self-Checkout

• AI voice ordering firm Presto closed on $10 million in new funding, led by Metropolitan Partners Group, with participation from Remus Capital, Link Ventures, and several strategic angel investors including the CEO of ElevenLabs.

• Amazon is discontinuing its Amazon One palm payment platform, which the ecommerce giant rolled out in the wake of the pandemic. Currently used by third party retailers, athletic facilities and gymnasia, the technology will be redeployed to healthcare settings.

• Amazon is shuttering its Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go branded markets, refocusing its efforts on Whole Foods and online delivery. The closure will affect around 70 locations, with the plurality based in California. In that case, it looks like the newest version of its Dash smart carts will be headed to Whole Foods only.

Industry Trends

• Shenzhen Picea Robotics Co. buys the assets of Roomba-maker iRobot for pennies on the dollar, after the iconic robotics brand filed for bankruptcy.

In Other News

Tesla’s diner went from hot to flop in six months. Stream and Uber partner on AV deliveries. Zipline raises $600M+ for drone deliveries. Is San Francisco contemplating revoking ban on delivery robots? Job alert: Matternet seeks Business Development Manager. $100M+ seed rounds make up a growing share of venture funding. Chinese AV trucking startup DeepWay raises $173M ahead of IPO. Pipedream Labs launched Goods. Kodiak AI partners with Bosch.

Our invite-only Urban Autonomy Summit, presented by Nexar, is shaping up to be a truly peerless gathering of autonomy and robotics’ most pivotal players. Speakers include:

• ​Andrew Chapin — COO, Nuro

• ​Xiaodi Hou — CEO & Founder, Bot Auto

• ​Jeremy Bird — Executive Vice President, Lyft

• ​Ashwini Anburajan — CEO, Obi

• ​Jeffrey Tumlin — Former Director of Transportation, SFMTA

• ​Neha Palmer — CEO, Terawatt

• Luc Vincent — Chief R&D Officer, Nexar

• ​Ryan Green — CEO & Co-Founder, Gridwise Analytics

• ​Matt Wood — VP of Safety and Validation, May Mobility

• ​Ashu Rege — Vice President of Autonomy & Head of DoorDash Labs, DoorDash

• ​Rachel Swan — Transportation Reporter, SF Chronicle

• ​Claire Eagen — Global Head of Legal, Vay

• ​Erin Galiger — Director, North American Markets, Rocsys

• ​Lora Kolodny — Tech Reporter, CNBC

• ​Rya Jetha — Tech Culture Reporter, SF Standard

• ​Jonathan Colbert — Head of Marketing, Voltera

Free Admission for Ottomate Pro Subscribers

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Delivery Robotics, Drones & AVs

• Startship Technologies launched a new pilot project with Foodora, bringing automated restaurant and grocery deliveries to Prague. The service will start with three robots in Prague 8, serving a 2 km radius around McDonald’s Karlín.

  

• Serve Robotics expands its sidewalk bot delivery service to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, in partnership with Uber Eats.

• Amazon’s aerial drone project faced yet another setback, with the FAA investigating a recent drone crash taking down local internet service in central Texas.

• DHL teamed up with Infineon Technologies and Zelostech to launch Singapore’s first supply chain-focused AV.

  

Humanoids

• The highly competitive humanoid space saw a new contender enter the arena: meet Paris-based UMA, focused on general-purpose robotics.

• British startup Humanoid unveiled the bipedal version of its HMND 01 Alpha, developed in only 5 months and able to walk “within 48 hours of assembly.”

• China’s Agibot delivered its 5,000th humanoid. The company, founded by ex-Huawei engineers, has four models in its lineup.

Back of House Automation

• Kroger closes three Ocado-powered automated grocery fulfillment centers, resulting in $350 million in one-time expenses.

• Chef Robotics released Chef+, with doubled ingredient capacity, reduced footprint, improved reliability, increased food safety and more.

Farm & Sourcing Automation

• Bushel Plus formed a strategic partnership with John Deere to make the Bushel Plus SmartPan system available through Deere’s U.S. and Canada dealer network. By physically collecting and calculating bushels-per-acre losses, the SmartPan System provides farmers with verification to calibrate and validate their automation.

Industry Trends

• Trump Administration looks to create national robotics strategy to compete with China.

Kiosks & Self-Checkout

• Sweet Robo revealed ChocoPrint, its first-ever 3D chocolate printer, at CES 2026.

In Other News

Olo integrates Zipline drone deliveries into its ordering platform. Mercado Libre adds Agility Robotics’ Digit humanoid to its facility in Texas. Serve Robotics builds 2,000th robot. Harper’s goes deep into humanoids and hype. Former Apple engineers raised $107M for Lyte, to improve robotic perception.

From strip malls in the Valley to the South Bay, Hollywood and the desert fringes, you can walk into the most forgettable-looking plaza imaginable and walk out having devoured a delicious, reasonably priced sushi meal. These places are essential to LA’s food culture — and lately, they’ve been struggling.

The pandemic pushed countless sushi chefs into early retirement. Those who remained have been squeezed by higher ingredient costs, rising wages, and ever-increasing rents. With that tricky context: can automation help these neighborhood institutions survive, and even thrive, for decades to come?

Inside LA Sushi Co., the vibe is contemporary but warm: bright blue tile, a handful of tables, and a generous display of fish behind the counter. That’s where I spot the machines I’m here to see — Autec’s maki and nigiri “sushi robots.”

The term “sushi robot” might conjure images of a blade-wielding automaton expertly slicing tuna, but these machines do something far more modest. They prepare rice.

Sushi rice is deceptively complex. It has to be seasoned with the right balance of sugar and vinegar, shaped consistently, and served at just the right temperature. It’s foundational to good sushi — and, as the chef working the bar explains, it’s also the least interesting part of an itamae’s job. The work is repetitive, physically demanding, and largely invisible to customers, even though it’s essential to every piece that leaves the counter.

I order a few rolls and nigiri, neatly presented in a Sugarfish-style box. The verdict: impressive. The rice is spot-on, the fish — still very much prepared by human hands — is excellent. This eight-piece box costs $21, which is borderline miraculous for this part of town. Walk 100 feet down the block to Katsuya, and you’ll pay more than that for just an order of rainbow rolls.

For Nate Hahn, the restaurant’s co-owner, the machines are central to making the economics work. He estimates they reduce labor costs by roughly 50%, while also speeding up throughput — critical for a business built around the lunch rush, both in-store and via delivery.

The efficiency gains matter even more at scale. LA Sushi Co. also operates locations inside several Southern California sports stadiums. Producing $80,000 worth of sushi during a halftime window, Hahn notes, simply wouldn’t be possible without this kind of automation.

Autec’s technology isn’t new. The company began developing sushi robots in the 1980s as a side project within Japanese audio giant Audio-Technica. What’s changed is adoption: in recent years, these machines have quietly proliferated. There are now an estimated 200 to 300 in Southern California alone.

That spread reflects a broader truth about automation in food service. The most successful applications aren’t about replacing humans with flashy androids — they’re removing the most repetitive, least rewarding tasks so that workers can focus on craft, quality, and customer experience.

If keeping affordable sushi lunches on the menu in Los Angeles requires machines that make better rice, more consistently, and at a lower cost, that feels less like a dystopian future and more like a pragmatic compromise. In a city where everything else keeps getting more expensive, this may be automation at its best: quiet, boring, and in service of something deeply human.

Waymo has famously taken an HD maps approach, while Tesla has been an even more vocal proponent of going mapless. Other companies have taken the no maps approach as well: Imagry, founded in Haifa and led by CEO Eran Ofir, is one of the companies betting that a lighter, perception-driven stack can make autonomy more deployable and affordable. The company’s camera-based system has been tested on buses and shuttles in Israel, Japan, Germany, and the U.S., with a focus on constrained but commercially meaningful routes. As the industry moves past the hype cycle of robotaxi demos and into the harder work of sustainable deployment, Imagry’s experience offers a useful lens into what autonomy looks like when it has to perform outside the lab — whether that future is mapped to the centimeter or not. We checked in with Eran to get his latest thoughts on the mapping debate.

Ottomate News: To start, give us the elevator pitch for Imagry.

Eran Ofir: Imagry delivers vision-based autonomous driving solutions without HD maps, lidar, or the cloud. We are pioneering Generative Autonomy: real-time intelligence that drives machines in the physical world. Our AI-centric platform, unlike rule-based systems, learns from experience and adapts to any road, vehicle, or condition, just like a human, only better.

Already deployed across transit and fleet vehicles, Imagry is solving the scalability challenge for both public transportation and passenger cars. Our real-time, hardware-agnostic architecture integrates seamlessly with existing platforms, giving automakers and transit operators a cost-effective, production-ready autonomy solution.

The next leap in GenAI isn’t a chatbot. It’s a driver. Today we drive buses and cars. Tomorrow, we power every intelligent machine that moves.

Most AV stacks still lean on HD maps, even if they talk about “reducing” dependence. What made you confident enough to go fully mapless, and where do you see that choice giving Imagry an enduring advantage vs. players like Mobileye or Wayve who also push lower-map approaches?

Imagry has always believed in the philosophical approach that an AI autonomous driving system should completely mimic the way people think and act. We humans don’t drive with HD maps, since we see the road and understand it. It has always been our premise (since 2018) that a full, uncompromised AI solution is the only practical approach to autonomous driving. We knew this approach would eventually be viable and ultimately prevail (once edge computing in the vehicle would be capable enough, which happened approximately two years ago). Currently only Tesla, Imagry, and Wayve have such capability. This provides us with a huge advantage in project bids, as it means that our vehicles/buses can drive everywhere, and not just in a small and limited geo-fenced area dictated by the HD-map being used by the less advanced players in the market.

You’ve previously said big parts of the AV industry spent billions on flashy demos while you focused on making autonomy actually work in daily service. What did you do differently in your first real deployments—like the autonomous buses in Israel—and what surprised you most when theory met messy real-world operations?

Our approach wasn’t to do demos that would look nice but be built on weak technology. Rather, from the get-go we built the foundation of an AI system that learns by imitation. Also, we didn’t take the unsupervised approach, which is quick and dirty, but the supervised approach to AI training, which is much slower but serves as a very solid foundation for training the neural networks.

When we got on the road (in the U.S., Germany, Japan, Israel…), we learned that lab simulations have little to do with real autonomous driving on public, mixed traffic roads. We learned that keeping latency to a minimum is of paramount importance, and every small change there leads to significant different behavior. We learned that urban driving (which is our forte) is much more complex than highway driving, and we learned how difficult and sophisticated a system should be in order to be able to drive on both sides of the road (most players in the world drive only on right-hand-side or left-hand-side, but not both with the same system, as Imagry does).

Imagry is camera-only and hardware-agnostic, which may be attractive on cost—but safety regulators and OEMs love redundancy. How do you make the safety case for a vision-only system, and what are the long tail risks you worry about?

It has been proven time and again that the need for lidar and radar is not real and was only pushed by their vendors (all of whom have lost >90% of their value since coming on the scene). In the AI era, a camera-based system that sees 100m-300m and 360 degrees doesn’t need lidar or radar that anyhow don’t understand what they see and can’t understand colors and signs. We humans are not equipped with lidar and radars and yet regulators trust us to drive well! Also, given that the response time of our system is at least 3 times faster than a human, it is safer than a human driver. Tesla, XPeng, Volvo, and Imagry are already using vision-only systems, and I expect that by the end of the decade, most OEMs will adopt the vision-only approach. Cameras are continually improving. Now we also drive in dark nights using thermal cameras. We work closely with regulators globally, and they understand now that the old adage “hardware will solve it all” has become extinct; now it’s AI software that rules.

Join AV and AI leaders at the Urban Autonomy Summit, an invite-only gathering, Jan. 28th in San Francisco. Apply to attend now.

Who do you see as your main customers over the next five years: transit operators, Tier-1s, or the OEMs themselves? And what do partnerships look like in terms of integration, revenue models, data sharing and the like?

Our target customers for our autonomous buses are public transportation operators (PTOs) and municipalities, and fleets (for our roboshuttle offering). Yes, we do work with OEMs, but as partners for providing the needed pre-integrated vehicles to our customers.

You’re live or testing in multiple regions—from Israel to the U.S., Germany and Japan. What are the hidden bottlenecks to scaling from a handful of routes and vehicles to thousands—are they primarily technical, regulatory, operational, or commercial?

The main bottleneck is the regulation, specifically, the length of time required to obtain an L4 driverless permit in a country. We already see cases where the public operator is getting closer to being able to pull out the drivers, and they are preparing budgets to purchase dozens of autonomous buses for their fleets during 2026 and early 2027. It’s only a matter of time. The technology is there, but much still needs to happen in the market with respect to the integration of multiple systems (e.g., connecting to ticketing, billing, control room, etc.), in order for the autonomous vehicle to be ready for full scale in prime time. I would give it around five years until the full solution becomes standard.

Imagry talks about bio-inspired, imitation-learning-based driving. As models get larger and more “world-model-like,” how does your stack evolve—do you see a path to a single generalized “AI driver,” or will vehicular autonomy always be highly domain-specific?

Read more

Delivery Robotics, Drones & AVs

• Zoox opened up its robotaxi network to public users in San Francisco, offering free rides in the SoMa, Mission and Design District neighborhoods.

• Coco Robotics is expanding its partnership with DoorDash, bringing its delivery bots to Miami, with a focus on the 3PD’s DashMart locations.

  • Coco and DoorDash first announced their nationwide partnership at Curbivore 2025 — rewatch the discussion here — and secure your tickets to Curbivore 2026.

• Waymo is expanding across California, turning on freeway driving, while expanding its service area to include more of the Bay Area and SoCal. Out of the Golden State, the Alphabet-backed AVer is also headed to Miami, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Orlando, followed by Baltimore, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and St. Louis.

• Drone delivery heavyweight Zipline is expanding its healthcare logistics platform across Africa, backed by up to $150 million in new funding from the U.S. Department of State.

• Autonomous trucking startup Einride hopes to go public via SPAC, at a $1.8 billion pre-money valuation. The company may want to first clear up its lawsuit with Maersk; the two companies are clashing over a failed partnership that was meant to encompass 300 trucks.

• Serve Robotics’ Q3 results sees revenue come in at $687k.

• Tesla received its final permit, allowing it to operate a robotaxi network in Arizona.

• Uber Eats launched a new partnership with PDD stalwart Starship Robotics, launching in the U.K. by year’s end, with Europe following next year and the U.S. coming in 2027.

• Tokyo-based Turing raised ¥15.3 Billion ($98.6 million USD) for its autonomous vehicle tech-stack.

• Wing and Walmart have expanded their partnership, bringing drone deliveries to the suburbs of Atlanta.

• Uber has taken Avride’s autonomous Hyundai’s live in Dallas; the safety-driver equipped cars are now cruising across Downtown, Uptown, Turtle Creek and Deep Ellum.

Humanoids

• Andy Rubin, famed inventor of the Android operating system, is launching a stealthy robotics startup, based out of Tokyo.

• Founded by ex-Nvidia researchers, Flexion has raised $50 million to create a “brain” for new humanoids. Investors include DST Global Partners, NVentures, Redalpine, Prosus Ventures and Moonfire Ventures.

• Figure AI has been sued by an ex-employee who alleges the company’s humanoid can “fracture a human skull.”

Back of House Automation

• Sweetgreen has sold Infinite Kitchens, its automated bowl-making solution, to Wonder. The salad-slinging startup fetched $186 million for the subsidiary, while retaining the rights to continue using the tech, having once purchased it (when it was known as Spyce) for about $70M.

• Appetronix raised $10 million for high-traffic kitchen robotics, with funding coming from Jim Grote (founder of Donatos Pizza,) the Grote family and AlleyCorp.

• Kroger is shuttering three of its Ocado-powered automated fulfillment centers, located in Pleasant Prairie, WI; Frederick, MD; and Groveland, FL.

  

• Tesla Diner, the automaker’s tech-forward restaurant in Los Angeles, lost its head chef less than four months after opening. (More on the Tesla Diner here.)

• Fresh off of raising $12 million, Armstrong Robotics is debuting a new general-purpose robot for commercial kitchens and restaurants, initially going to market with a focus on dishwashing.

Farm & Sourcing Automation

• Monarch Tractors was sued by one of its dealers, which alleged that the startup’s autonomous farm machinery is “defective” and “unable to operate autonomously.”

Industry Trends

• Robot orders in North America grew in Q3, reaching 8,806 robots, with a value of $574 million, a 17.2% rise in revenue YoY.

• China’s economic-planning agency is warning the humanoid center may be experiencing a bubble, as over 150 companies race to market with similar products.

  

Kiosks & Self-Checkout

• Estonia is mulling legislation that would allow for self-service pharmacies, using kiosks to provide medical necessities to rural villages.

In Other News

Tesla hopes to begin Cybercab production in April. Sweetgreen opens Infinite Kitchen powered, drive-thru oriented Sweetlane in Costa Mesa. Russian humanoid flops on stage. Can Claude train a robotic dog? Tesla opened up its Austin robotaxi network to all iPhone users. The ethical concerns around the police use of robotic dogs. Sodexo names new North American head. LOXO begins autonomous grocery deliveries in Germany. Isuzu begins AV trucking tests in Japan. Physical Intelligence raises $600M for robotic foundation models, backers include Alphabet’s venture arm. Tutor Intelligence raises $34M for warehouse robotics. Meet the workers training new robots. Two new robotic wok restaurants have opened in LA — which one is better? MIT student’s highly-cited AI study falls apart under scrutiny.

1X became the first humanoid-maker to make their robot available to purchase by the general public. Intended for home uses like chores and cleaning, Neo is a 66-pound bot, running $20,000. Critics have been quick to note the machine is almost constantly recording its surroundings, with remote operators accomplishing almost all the tasks that might eventually be automated.

And in mega-funding news, Avride raised $375 million, via a mix of funds coming from its parent company Nebius Group, as well as outside capital from Uber. The company plans to use the capital to expand its robotaxi service to 500 vehicles. Avride also expanded its partnership with Grubhub, launching in Jersey City, the first time Grubhub has taken robots off of a college campus. (More on that story over at The Curbivore.)

Delivery Robotics, Drones & AVs

• DoorDash will deploy Waymo’s full-size robotaxis for food deliveries in Phoenix, AZ. Arizona has become a real testing grounds for the 3PD, which is also deploying its Dot robot nearby. DoorDash’s premium DashPass members will also get discounts on Waymo rides.

• Swedish autonomous trucking startup Einride expanded its partnerships with postal group PostNord and food manufacturer Mars, while competitor Waabi deepened its tie-up with Volvo.

• Starship Robotics closed on a $50 million Series C, led by Plural, with participation from Karma.vc, Latitude, Coefficient Capital, SmartCap, and Skaala. Starship plans to use the capital to begin in-city operations in the United States.

  

• Dave’s Hot Chicken pilots drone delivery in Los Angeles with Matternet.

• Beijing’s Neolix closed on $600 million in Series D financing, led by UAE-based StoneVenture, with participation by Gaocheng Capital, CITIC Capital, CDH, Sparkedge Capital, Beijing AI Fund, Legend Capital, Gaorong Ventures, and Templewater. Neolix makes an L4-capable autonomous delivery vehicle, capable of on-road driving. The startup obtained China’s first autonomous delivery license in 2021, and now works with marquee logistics brands like DiDi Freight, SF Express, JD Logistics, China Post, STO, YTO, ZTO, and J&T Express.

• China’s Apollo Go is entering Switzerland. The Baidu subsidiary will provide Level 4 autonomous vehicles for the country’s rural public transport provider, PostBus.

  

• Waymo continues its U.S. expansion, with its robotaxi service headed to San Diego, Las Vegas and Detroit.

Humanoids

• Chinese humanoid robot maker Leju Robot raises 1.5 billion CNY (approximately $207M) in pre-IPO funding.

• DEEP Robotics launched its new generation of industrial-grade humanoid robot, the DR02, featuring IP66 all-weather capabilities.

  

• Figure AI launches its 3rd-generation model, including soft goods handling, wireless charging, improved audio system for voice reasoning and battery improvements.

• Humanoid deployed human-like robots to perform bin-picking of metallic bearing rings amidst clutter, carried out in a near-production setting at manufacturer Schaeffler’s site in Germany.

Back of House Automation

• Walmart and Avery Dennison are introducing a novel RFID technology for fresh categories like meat, bakery and deli to improve inventory accuracy and reduce food waste.

  

• AutoStore unveils AutoCase, to automate the loading and unloading of full cases, combining case handling and piece-picking in one flow. Other new features include FlexBins, Frozen-Only Grid, CarouselAI enhancements, improved fire standards, and more.

• Simbe rolls out its Tally inventorying robot to 17-store grocer Harmons, in Utah.

• Brain Corp and Driveline launch ShelfOptix shelf-intelligence machines, with pilots in Winn-Dixie and Harveys Supermarket.

Farm & Sourcing Automation

• Following its acquisition of farm-ng, Bonsai Robotics rolled out the Amiga Flex, Amiga Trax and Amiga Max, for weeding, hauling materials, towing sprayers / mowers, and scouting crops.

  

Industry Trends

• Amazon scales back hiring by 600,000; will instead rely on more and more robots and “cobots.”

Kiosks & Self-Checkout

• Instacart’s smart Caper Carts are headed to Big Bunny Market in Massachusetts and Stewart’s Marketplace in Utah.

• San Francisco’s Pasta Supply Co. introduced the Bay Area’s first Italian noodle vending machine, serving tortellini and bucatini at Spark Social SF.

In Other News

SoftBank to buy ABB’s robotics business for $5.4 billion. Serve Robotics sells $100 million in new stock. Revolute Robotics raises $1.9M to deploy for drone that can fly and drive. Feds probe Waymo-school bus incident. Japanese c-stores are hiring “robots” run by Filipino workers. GM plans hands-free, eyes-free driving by 2028. Grab to collaborate with May Mobility on robotaxis. Amazon plans augmented reality glasses for delivery workers. AgiBot launches zero-code platform: LinkCraft. Kiwibot finishes rebrand to Robot.com with the launch of new hardware. Nvidia expands robotaxi ambitions with Uber, Stellantis, Lucid, Mercedes-Benz and Aurora. “TSA-like security screening” could ground drone economy ambitions. UCLA professor Bolei Zhou joins Coco Robotics. Tesla hopes to operate 1,500 note-quite-AVs by year’s end.