How it began
Starship Technologies was founded in Tallinn in 2014 by Ahti Heinla, chief architect of Skype, and Janus Friis, a Skype co-founder. Heinla had entered a NASA Centennial Challenge competition to build a robot that could collect samples, with a team named Kuukulgur, or Moon Rover. The team did not win, but Heinla and Friis decided to apply the technology to last-mile delivery. The first prototype of a delivery robot was built in August 2014.
How it works
The robots are small self-driving vehicles that travel on sidewalks and cross roads on their own to bring groceries, takeaway food and packages to customers. The company describes its 2018 service as the first commercial use of level 4 autonomous driving in cities. The fleet learned its surroundings gradually: by June 2016 a small number of robots had driven 5,000 kilometers, and by November 2019 the robots had made five million road crossings.
How it spread
Test driving began in European cities in 2015, and pilot services followed in 2016 in the United States and the United Kingdom. In April 2018 a delivery service started in Milton Keynes with the retailers Co-op and Tesco. Services later opened on university campuses in the United States, in Tallinn in 2021, in Finland in 2022, and in Germany, Sweden and Czechia in 2025. A partnership with Bolt Food began in October 2024.
Who pushed back
MIT Technology Review reported in 2018 that sidewalk delivery robots still needed human safety monitors. In June 2026 the British pedestrian charity Living Streets raised concerns with the government about delivery robots on congested pavements after Starship announced plans to expand. In March 2020 the company laid off staff at the start of the pandemic, then rehired many of them about six months later.
Where it stands today
Starship reports more than 10 million autonomous deliveries with a fleet of about 3,000 robots in more than 300 locations across eight countries. Its business and engineering headquarters are in Estonia, with research and development in Helsinki. The company says that in Finland about one in five grocery deliveries is now made by one of its robots.
