Most delivery automation stops at the curb. But for Veho and Zurich-based robotics startup Rivr, the real challenge — and opportunity — lies in those final 100 yards from van to doorstep.
In a pilot program launching Tuesday in Austin, Rivr’s four-wheeled, stair-climbing delivery robot, which CEO and founder Marko Bjelonic describes as “a dog on rollerskates,” will ferry packages from Veho’s vans directly to customers’ front doors.
The companies are starting small, they told TechCrunch exclusively. Just one highly supervised robot will work daily, making five-to-six-hour runs over the span of a couple of weeks throughout Austin. But both companies see it as a critical step towards solving a unique slice of the end-to-end autonomous delivery journey.
Bjelonic says that in last-mile delivery, “robotics makes an impact by actually solving these very challenging problems that are actually quite easy for humans but hard for robots. And we see [Rivr] as a differentiator, almost as the next evolutionary step from the sidewalk robots.”
Aside from its U.S. debut, the partnership with Veho – which delivers across 50 U.S. markets for brands like Sephora, Saks, HelloFresh, and more – also gives Rivr an opportunity to both test its technology and accumulate data necessary to build a general physical AI framework.
“What we have seen in the robotic space is that there’s a data barrier, because ChatGPT and other chatbots have the internet as training data, and autonomous cars have thousands of cars on the street that they can attach sensors to and start collecting data,” Bjelonic told TechCrunch. “But in the robotics world, that kind of dataset is missing, so you need to find the meaningful use case where you can solve a real problem, and then you can start collecting all of the data to make these robots more intelligent.”
For Veho, this partnership is a chance to test what automation looks like from the van to the customer’s door and potentially allows for more deliveries to take place at once, particularly in dense urban areas where both the driver and the robot can tag team a particular street simultaneously. Bjelonic says Rivr’s “robot helpers” can also “reduce the workload on these drivers” by taking over the physically demanding task of walking door to door.
During the Austin trial, a Rivr employee will accompany the bot to ensure safety and delivery quality. Bjelonic told TechCrunch the bots can operate autonomously but remote operators will be able to tap in if they get stuck.
The Austin pilot will start in the more residential area of northwest Austin before expanding to denser areas of town, according to Fred Cook, Veho’s co-founder and CTO. In the future, Cook says he could imagine pairing the vehicles with certain types of vehicles with charging stations for the bots to keep them going for a full day of work.
Rivr hopes to use the learnings from its partnership with Veho to scale to 100 bots by next year and thousands in 2027. The startup is currently operating in the U.K. through a partnership with delivery platform Evri. Rivr has raised more than $25 million, including from a Jeff Bezos-led round that valued the company at $100 million.
