Cartken and its tiny sidewalk delivery robots first started out in the world with a narrow charter: carrying everything from burritos and bento boxes to pizza and pad thai the last mile to hungry customers.
But the vision — thanks to the startup’s approach to autonomous vehicle technology — has always been broader, according to Cartken co-founder and CEO Christian Bersch. From its early days, Bersch and the rest of the founding team saw an opportunity for their robots to navigate the external environment of pedestrian-filled sidewalks and the internal world of factories, laboratories, industrial buildings, and even airports.
A robot’s ability to move between indoor and outdoor space seems simple enough. And yet, Bersch says it isn’t. It is here that Cartken and its 30-person team are carving out a niche in the ever-evolving autonomous vehicle industry.
Investors appear sold on the potential. Cartken has raised a total of $22.5 million with $10 million in its latest funding round led by 468 Capital, according to TechCrunch exclusively. Funds Incubate Fund, Deep tech and AI, LDV Partners and Vela Partners also participated, as well as strategic funds from Magna International, Mitsubishi Electric, Shell Ventures and Volex.
The startup, founded in 2019 by former Google engineers behind the Bookbot project, operates a sidewalk delivery bot business on various campuses in Miami, Fairfax, Virginia and Tokyo through partnerships with Uber Eats, Grubhub and Mitsubishi Electric. Cartken robots average 36,000 deliveries per month.
Now, it’s bringing the robots to biotech, pharmaceutical and automotive campuses, including a factory operating from Germany ZF. Some of this new capital raised will be used to scale the more mature curbside delivery bot business, which Bersch says is profitable today. Most of the funds will be used to “unlock these new (internal) use cases,” he added.
Cartken co-founder and COO Anjali Jindal Naik noted in a recent interview that they were surprised by the number of companies that approached the startup looking for robots that can move between indoor and outdoor environments.
“They’ve been looking for other solutions, especially ones that go indoors and outdoors, and they weren’t really finding them,” he added.
Cartken uses what it describes as a hardware agnostic artificial intelligence approach to autonomy. That means an autonomous driving system that uses a camera-based system—no lidar—that uses AI models, trained on hundreds of thousands of images, to detect objects, as well as software algorithms to perceive and navigate the environment. Unlike some other outdoor delivery robots, Cartken does not rely on GPS, allowing it to operate indoors. And robots are built to handle sunlight and rain, pedestrians and rough terrain, all the demands needed to handle outdoor environments. The autonomous driving system can also be ported to different robot form factors and sizes.
The technology is much closer to what you’d have in self-driving cars than a traditional factory robot, according to Bersch.
In practice, robots at the ZF factory carry parts that a human technician would previously cycle to other parts of the vast campus.
“That was time wasted down the line, Bersch said, noting that it has translated into immediate savings. In 2023, Cartken robots operating in laboratories and factories in the biotech, pharmaceutical, chemical and automotive sectors saved workers more than 10,000 hours of transportation, according to the company.
