Sam Altman is making a bet on something new: autonomous delivery robots. But, why?
What’s happening:
- Autonomous delivery company Coco Robotics has raised $80M USD in a new strategic financing round
- The new funding round was led by OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman, Pelion, Outlander and others
Why it matters:
- Coco Robotics is one of the fastest growing companies leveraging robotics for deliveries and has already successfully completed more than 500,000 deliveries throughout the United States and Finland
Going deeper:
- Coco Robotics has existing contracts with multiple notable restaurant chains including Subway, Wingstop and Jack in the Box as well as partnerships with both UberEats and DoorDash
- Coco Robotics has publicly stated they plan to use the new growth capital to aggressively ramp up the deployment of robots in new cities globally as well as improving their artificial intelligence and computer vision technology
The intrigue:
- OpenAI and Coco Robotics just recently formed a new strategic partnership in which Coco Robotics is able to leverage OpenAI’s artificial intelligence models for improving the decision making and navigation of their robot fleet and OpenAI is able to gather real world robotics data to train its new models
The fine print:
- Coco Robotics’ fleet of robots are currently still piloted remotely by human beings and are not yet capable of operating fully autonomously
