Cartken and its small, sidewalk-delivery robots have entered the world with a specific mission: to transport 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—was always broader, says Cartken co-founder and CEO Christian Birch. From the early days, Birch and the rest of the founding team saw an opportunity for their robots to navigate the outdoor environment of pedestrian-filled sidewalks and the indoor world of factories, labs, industrial buildings, and even airports.
The robot’s ability to move indoors and out sounds simple enough. But Birch says it’s not. And that’s where Cartken and its 30-strong team are carving out a niche in the ever-evolving autonomous vehicle industry.
Investors seem to be buying into the possibilities. Cartken has raised $22.5 million in total, with $10 million in its latest funding round led by 468 Capital, TechCrunch has learned exclusively. The round also included Incubate Fund, deep tech and AI funds LDV Partners and Vela Partners, as well as strategic funds from Magna International, Mitsubishi Electric, Shell Ventures, and Volex.
The startup, founded in 2019 by former Google engineers behind the Bookbot project, runs curbside delivery operations at several campuses, including in Miami, Fairfax, Virginia, and Tokyo, through partnerships with Uber Eats, GrabHub, and Mitsubishi Electric. Cartken’s robots are averaging 36,000 deliveries a month.
Now, robots are being introduced into university campuses specializing in biotechnology, pharmaceuticals and automotive, including a factory run by a Germany-based company. ZFBirch said some of the newly raised capital will be used to scale up its more mature sidewalk delivery robot business, which he said is profitable today. The bulk of the money will be used to “unlock these new (internal) use cases,” he added.
Anjali Jindal Naik, co-founder and COO of Kartken, said in a recent interview that they were surprised by the number of companies approaching the startup looking for robots that could move between indoor and outdoor environments.
“They looked for other solutions, especially those that included indoor and outdoor spaces, but they didn’t really find them,” she added.
Cartken uses what it describes as an AI-driven approach to autonomy. That means a self-driving system that uses a camera-based system — no lidar — that uses AI models, trained on hundreds of thousands of images, to detect objects as well as software algorithms to perceive and navigate the environment. Unlike some other outdoor delivery robots, Cartken doesn’t rely on GPS, allowing it to operate indoors. The robots are also designed to handle sunlight, rain, pedestrians, and uneven terrain, all of which are required to navigate outdoor environments. The self-driving system can also be ported to different robot form factors and sizes.
According to Birch, the technology is much closer to what you’d find in a self-driving car than what you’d find in a traditional factory robot.
In practice, robots at the ZF factory carry parts that human technicians would previously have transported by bicycle to other parts of the vast campus.
That was lost time on the production line, Birch said, noting that it translated into immediate savings. In 2023, Kartken robots operating in labs and factories in the biotech, pharmaceutical, chemical and automotive sectors saved employees more than 10,000 hours in transportation, according to the company.