Robot.com’s sidewalk delivery robot R-Kiwi has completed 2.4 million tasks across campuses and city sidewalks. | Source: Robot.com
Robot.com recently announced a seven-year commercial agreement with Sodexo Group. This new agreement builds on a partnership that began in 2021 and that has expanded across select Sodexo-operated college campuses in North America.
“Sodexo is an amazing partner, and it has around 400,000 employees globally, and 120,000 full-time employees in the U.S.,” Felipe Chavez Cortes, the co-founder and CEO of Robot.com, toldThe Robot Report. “It’s one of the companies that is suffering from labor shortages and has been unable to fulfill its open positions.”
He noted that Robot.com and Sodexo’s long-standing relationship paved the way for the seven-year contract.
“Seven-year contracts don’t come right away,” Cortes said. “It was a learning process for both companies on what it takes to implement robotics, and what it takes to add value on both sides.”
This seven-year contract represents Robot.com’s largest single enterprise deployment. Cortes asserted that it also demonstrates Sodexo’s leadership in bringing practical, scalable technologies to complexserviceenvironments.
“It’s important to say that Sodexo was the first company to implement food delivery robots on college campuses, and one of the first companies to scale upfooddelivery in general,” Cortes said.
College campuses have emerged as a proving ground for sidewalkdelivery robots. In recent years, however, some providers have pulled back from these deployments. For example,Starship Technologiesrecentlyannounced plansto wind down its campus deliveries in favor ofgroceries.
San Francisco-based Robot.com, founded in 2017 asKiwibot, is taking a different route. “I do feel that college campuses are a very good staging environment. You’re outside. You have people, but it’s not as crazy as urban,” Cortes said.
So how is Robot.com making it economically viable? Cortes said it’s all about thecompany‘s Remi implementation platform.
“Remi is our robot implementation intelligence, and it’s a product and platform that we have been developing for almost a decade,” he explained. “That allows us to bring the best classical robotics mixed with the best brain third-party software and very smartadvertisingtechnology. Remi is basically our secret sauce.”
“When we implement Remi, we basically get better economics on the costs of implementing the robots,” added Cortes. “Also, we can increase our revenue when we mix advertising in, so we don’t just get revenue from delivery.”