Bezos-backed robotics firm teams with Veho on e-commerce delivery

Crowdsourced delivery technology company Veho has begun testing whether wheeled-legged parcel delivery robots – capable of navigating stairs, porches, gates and uneven terrain – can boost productivity in urban environments.

Veho provides last-mile delivery for retailers like Sephora, Warby Parker, Lululemon, Saks, Stitch Fix, Nespresso and Macy’s, as well as third-party logistics providers Flexport, ShipHero and Stord. On Tuesday, it launched a pilot program in Austin, Texas, with Swiss robotics and AI firm Rivr to deliver e-commerce packages from a vehicle to customers’ doorsteps using robots.

Rivr says its goal is to place 1 million delivery robots in cities. The Zurich-based company changed its name from Swiss-Mile in January to reflect its transformation from a university high-tech spinoff after raising $22 million in seed funding led by Amazon Executive Chair Jeff Bezos, through Bezos Expeditions, and HongShang Group. The Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund also participated in the funding round.

The initial pilot in Austin will involve one robot completing daily parcel deliveries over a two-week period, Veho said in an email response. “It’s a deliberately small-scale launch designed to gather operational insights, optimize integration with Veho’s platform, and inform a potential fleet expansion in Austin and beyond,” the company said.

Most autonomous delivery robots tried so far tend to be small containers on wheels used in food delivery applications, usually limited to curbside applications and with low throughput. Veho and Rivr say their smart machine is more capable, making multidrop delivery commercially viable.

The robots are not intended to replace human delivery drivers. Rather, they are intended to enable humans to deliver more parcels, faster, with less repetitive walking, while meeting Veho’s performance standards. The ability of robots to assist human delivery drivers may be particularly valuable in dense areas with many delivery stops but limited parking, the companies said in a news release. 

During the trial, the robot will be accompanied by a Rivr operator to ensure safety and delivery quality. While a human driver completes one drop-off, the wheeled-legged robot will deliver another, navigating from the delivery vehicle all the way to the customer’s doorstep, placing parcels according to the customer’s instructions, snapping a photo of each successful delivery and sending it to the customer via the Veho app. Working alongside Veho’s human couriers, the robot will have the capacity to deliver 200 packages per day. 

“This partnership is an exciting next step in reinventing e-commerce delivery and enabling brands to turn shipping from a cost center to a value driver,” said Veho co-founder and CEO Itamar Zur in the announcement. “When it comes to delivery, customers care most about its reliability, speed and cost. This partnership will help us learn if a robot working with a human can help reduce delivery costs while improving on-time-delivery and speed, all while maintaining a great delivery and brand experience.”

The trial is Rivr’s second global deployment. Rivr said it wanted a partner that had dense operations and good infrastructure in cities to test its robot. Veho has more than 30 distribution centers across the United States and a self-built app for 84,000 independent driver-partners. Veho says it now reaches more than 113 million people in 50 U.S. markets. In March, it expanded to New York City.

Veho’s model is different from other delivery services that rely on a tech platform and gig workers. Unlike other networks, the company creates routes of deliveries that last between two and six hours, ensuring the drivers have a steady amount of work and consistent pay for the hours they choose to work. With Veho, drivers have more upfront visibility into their workload and compensation. E-commerce shippers send items to Veho’s facility, where it will be sorted and matched with deliveries from other companies along routes that drivers can choose. Once a route is booked, the driver heads to the local Veho warehouse to pick up the orders and begin the delivery day.

In March, Rivr completed a short robot-delivery trial with the U.K.-based courier Evri in central England, and it plans to start a longer operational test there in June, according to Veho. Evri earlier this month agreed to a minority investment from DHL eCommerce and is merging operations with the global courier.

In Zurich, the Rivr robot has been operating Monday-Friday on a delivery route, achieving a throughput of 10 deliveries per hour, Veho said in the email. 

Investor interest

Investors have showered billions of dollars on companies with task-specific robots that can handle physical, dangerous work, preferring them over general-purpose humanoids that still face developmental challenges, Reuters reported last week. Specialized robots have become able to efficiently and affordably perform thanks to advances in semiconductors, which have enabled more sophisticated AI models that allow robots to perceive, process and react without needing remote servers. 

Rivr says it uses parallel graphics processing unit simulators from companies like Nvidia to recreate complex real-world physics and train its legged robots through trial and error, dramatically reducing training time compared to only operating in the field. By the time its robots are deployed, they have already encountered and adapted to millions of real-world scenarios in simulation, allowing them to master new tasks in just days, according to Rivr’s website.

Click here for more FreightWaves/American Shipper stories by Eric Kulisch.

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