Robomart, a startup that builds self-driving delivery robots, is unveiling its latest robot with an ambitious goal of using it to make on-demand delivery profitable. The Los Angeles-based company announced its patented Robomart RM5 on Monday. The level-four autonomous vehicle can carry up to 500 pounds and is made up of ten individual lockers that hold customer orders. This structure is designed to allow for batch ordering so a robot can work on multiple deliveries at the same time.
Robomart plans to use these new robots to operate an on-demand delivery business model similar to those of established food delivery platforms, according to Ali Ahmed, Robomart co-founder and CEO. This model involves retailers partnering with Robomart to open their own storefronts on the Robomart app, which is similar to apps like UberEats or DoorDash.
What is different is the cost structure for the customers. Each time a customer orders from Robomart they pay a flat three dollar delivery fee. The company hopes this will be a much more attractive option than the multiple fees typically charged by other delivery apps.
Robomart sees this as building its own autonomous marketplace, something that is unique in this space. The company plans to start onboarding retailers in its first market, Austin, Texas, over the next few months ahead of launching the delivery service later this year.
This announcement marks an expansion from Robomart’s roots. The company was founded in 2017 and started piloting an autonomous store on wheels in 2020, which brought a mobile autonomous store stocked with goods like pharmacy items and ice cream direct to customers who requested it.
While the company started with its store on wheels model, this move into on-demand delivery was a natural progression. The company knew it wanted to tackle on-demand delivery from the beginning.
Prior to Robomart, Ahmed founded Dispatch Messenger, an on-demand delivery platform in the U.K., in 2015. His previous company could not make the economics work to remain profitable while still relying on human delivery drivers. That experience focused his attention on automation to cut costs. Now, Ahmed believes they have cracked the code.
The robots bring the cost of a delivery down by up to seventy percent. That is a critical difference compared to paying a driver eighteen dollars an hour. Robomart has gotten to this point with very little funding, something that Ahmed said he is really proud of. The company has raised less than five million dollars in funding from several firms.
That funding has enabled the company to build five generations of robots and now deploy the first autonomous marketplace for the road. Ahmed is proud of the team and sees it as a testament to how much they have been able to achieve.
While the on-demand delivery sector is a crowded space with several large legacy players, Ahmed thinks Robomart is bringing a totally new product to market at a price he thinks consumers will find attractive. He believes the proposition of a three dollar flat fee with no other charges is very attractive to both retailers and customers, especially compared to the hidden markups and other fees common with other services.