Vayu’s robotic delivery vehicles navigate roads autonomously
Vayu
As the shift to e-commerce around the world shows no signs of slowing, retailers and online platforms are pursuing new strategies to outbid their competitors and increase their profitability. Vayu Robotics, which offers an innovative new logistics solution for last-mile delivery, believes it can play a key role.
Vayu makes low-cost robotic vehicles powered by artificial intelligence software that can operate fully autonomously to deliver orders from retailers’ local fulfillment centers to customers’ doorsteps. Once at the delivery location, the robots can also unload the order themselves and leave it at the customer’s doorstep.
CEO Anand Gopalan co-founded the business in 2022 with two partners, Mahesh Krishnamurthy and Nitish Srivastava, all of whom have extensive experience in robotics and sensor technology. “We saw the first wave of robotics make a big splash, but those models, while technologically advanced, were too expensive to provide a scalable solution for the e-commerce space,” Gopalan says. “We knew that with the second wave, we had to offer something that was much more affordable, but also consistently reliable.”
Vayu believes its robotic vehicles fit the bill: They can carry loads up to 100 pounds and travel on roads at speeds of up to 20 miles per hour. Crucially, each robot costs about $5,000 (previous autonomous vehicles cost hundreds of thousands of dollars). Vayu says the cost per delivery is just $1. This compares highly favorably to logistics solutions that rely on human delivery personnel and could propel the company to the heart of the e-commerce industry.
“E-commerce is a huge and growing market, but the economics of fulfillment are currently quite challenging for both retailers and customers,” Gopalan said. “Our robots create a much smaller carbon footprint than most deliveries using traditional transportation.”
Vayu has spent much of the past few months testing its robots on the streets of its San Francisco headquarters and the surrounding Bay Area, working with a handful of early customers on pilot projects. But now the company is poised to make a breakthrough, having just signed its first deal with what it calls a “major e-commerce company.”
Gopalan is keeping quiet about the identity of the new customer for now, but says they’ve ordered up to 2,500 Vayu robots, which the company plans to deploy in various North American cities in the coming months.
Vayu is backed by Khosla Ventures and has raised $12.7 million to date, but Gopalan said the company is close to announcing its next round of funding. The company plans to raise about $25 million to build out the capacity it will need to fulfill large orders for its robots.
“We believe in backing companies that can carve out large markets with significant, differentiated technology,” said Kanu Gulati, partner at Khosla Ventures, about the investment. “Vayu is a great example of this, bringing a novel sensing AI-based model to a robotics problem that has the potential to have a huge economic and societal impact.”
To be sure, the potential market for Vayu’s technology is huge: In the U.S. alone, roughly 23% of retail purchases are expected to be made online by 2027, and e-commerce continues to accelerate elsewhere.
Not surprisingly, many companies are racing to develop autonomous vehicles and other robotic solutions to cut delivery costs, and Vayu has rivals such as Starship Technologies, which is testing robots in a number of locations around the world.
But Gopalan sees an advantage to Vayu’s robots. “Other solutions are small and usually travel on sidewalks or pavements,” he says. “So they have a limited range.” Vayu’s robots are also the only vehicles that can unload packages themselves, he adds, which benefits both customers and retailers: If the customer isn’t there, the robot can make the delivery and then move on to the next stop.
Still, the space is likely to become increasingly competitive, with many of the largest e-commerce companies pursuing their own solutions or considering acquiring companies that can help them deliver.
Either way, it’s likely that in the near future many of the items purchased online will be delivered by robotic vehicles.