This Startup Is Deploying Thousands of Autonomous Delivery Robots

Its goal is to have the bots on 100 college campuses by 2021.

The College Try

When students and professors head to college this fall, they might glimpse an unexpected sight on campus: robots.

On Tuesday, San Francisco-based startup Starship Technologies announced that it had just secured an additional $40 million in funding — and that it plans to send thousands of its delivery robots to college campuses across the U.S. over the next two years.

"This new investment will see Starship expand onto more campuses as we head towards a goal of offering our service to over one million students," CEO Lex Bayer said in a press release. "An entire generation of university students are growing up in a world where they expect to receive a delivery from a robot after a few taps on their smartphone."

Special Delivery

Starship's six-wheeled autonomous bots are already making food and grocery deliveries on two campuses: Virginia's George Mason University and Arizona's Northern Arizona University.

Over the next two years, the company hopes to increase that number of campuses to 100, starting with Indiana's Purdue University in September and Pennsylvania's University of Pittsburgh this fall.

According to a new Verge story, Starship plans to send 25 to 50 bots to each new campus — meaning two years from now, college students could have upwards of 5,000 of the robots available to deliver pizza and other munchies right to their dorms.

READ MORE: Thousands of autonomous delivery robots are about to descend on US college campuses [The Verge]

More on delivery bots: Tiny Robots Will Deliver Your Lunch, Because We Hate Human Interaction