Robomart, a startup building autonomous delivery robots, is using the latest robots to announce on-demand delivery with an ambitious goal of increasing profitability.
The Los Angeles-based company announced its patented RoboMart RM5 on Monday. Level 4 self-driving cars can carry up to 500 pounds and consist of 10 separate lockers that hold customer orders. This structure is designed to allow batch orders so that the robot can operate simultaneously for multiple delivery.
Robomart plans to use these new robots to operate an on-demand delivery business model similar to the established food delivery platform, Ali Ahmed, co-founder and CEO of Robomart, told TechCrunch. This model includes partnering with Robomart to open its own storefront in the Robomart app. This is similar to apps like Ubereats and Doordash.
What’s different is the customer’s cost structure. Every time a customer orders from Robomart, they pay a flat $3 delivery fee. The company hopes it will become a much more attractive option than the multiple fees normally charged by other delivery apps, Ahmed said.
“We see this as creating our own autonomous market,” Ahmed said. “It’s something very unique in this area, and it’s an autonomous market for on-demand delivery using autonomous driving robots.”
Robomart plans to launch an onboarding retailer in its first market in Austin, Texas over the coming months before launching delivery services later this year.
The announcement shows an expansion from RoboMart’s roots. The company was founded in 2017 and began piloting the self-driving “wheel-on-wheel” in 2020. This led to mobile autonomous stores, which stocked items such as pharmacies and ice cream, directed to customers who requested them.
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The company started with the “wheel store” model, but this shift to delivering demand was a natural progression, Ahmed said. He added that he knew the company wanted to work on on-demand delivery from the start.
Before Robomart, Ahmed founded Dispatch Messenger, the UK’s on-demand delivery platform, in 2015. Ahmed said that economics cannot remain beneficial while his previous companies rely on human delivery drivers. It focused his attention on automation to reduce costs. Now Ahmed believes they cracked the code.
“Our robots reduce the cost of delivery by up to 70%,” Ahmed said. “That’s a significant difference. If you pay a driver $18 per hour, that driver costs $9-10 per hour.”
Robomart said at this point that he had little funding and that Ahmed was truly proud. The company raises less than $5 million in funding from companies such as Hustle Fund, SOSV and Wasabi Venture.
“We raised about $4 million in funding, which allowed us to build five generations of robots and now deploy our first autonomous market for roads,” Ahmed said. “We are proud of our team. That’s a testament to how much we have achieved.”
The on-demand delivery division is a busy space with several large legacy players, including Ubereats and Grubhub, but Ahmed believes Robomart is bringing all-new products to the market at prices that consumers think will attract.
“We won’t give them this incredible proposition at $3 and any other fees. [price] The markup itself can be prohibitively expensive,” Ahmed said. I’ll make this [our model] It is very appealing to retailers and customers. ”
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