Exploring the many faces of sidewalk delivery robots with Cartken’s Anjali Jindal Naik

Like many startup founders, Anjali Jindal Naik, co-founder and COO of autonomous sidewalk robot maker Cartken, was raised by entrepreneurs. Her parents owned a furniture store in North Carolina, and Naik spent much of middle school and high school helping out with managing warehouse deliveries, an experience that would later inform her current pursuits.

When she graduated from university, Naik’s father gave her some advice: Start your own business; don’t work for somebody else.

Naik followed her passion for Bollywood music and co-built her first company, Saavn, a successful distribution and streaming service for Indian and Bollywood music and content. At Saavn, Naik realized she liked to push the envelope with emerging tech and experiment with achieving product-market fit. Back in 2005, that meant working on ringtones for mobile phones, and even trying, and failing, to stream Indian concerts to mobile phones in the U.S.

Naik went on to handle operations and product for a number of companies, including, most notably, Google Express, a shopping service from Google that has since been swallowed by Google Shopping. It was there that she met the engineers over at the company’s Area 120 incubator for experimental products, Jonas Witt, Jake Stelman and Christian Bersch, who would later go on to become her co-founders at Cartken.

Witt, Stelman and Bersch worked on Bookbot, a sidewalk delivery robot that would deliver books from libraries. The project, and its pilot at Mountain View Library, was short-lived for business and political reasons rather than hardware or tech reasons – the robot reportedly operated quite well.

That was in 2018. Cartken was formed the following year.

Since then, Cartken has started pilots with Reef Technology to bring food from Reef’s network of delivery-only kitchens to customers in Miami, with Erasmus University in Rotterdam to delivery convenience store items to students, and with Mitsubishi to provide indoor and curb-side delivery for Starbucks customers at a popular mall in Japan.

We sat down with Naik to talk about the benefits of graduating from a tech giant like Google, the rising demand in the robotic sidewalk delivery space, and how a baseline of strong tech can enable new form factors.

The following interview, part of an ongoing series with founders who are building transportation companies, has been edited for length and clarity.

TechCrunch: What’s your biggest takeaway as a startup that’s broken away from a larger parent company like Google?

Anjali Jindal Naik: When you do something under a larger umbrella, like Google, you do a lot of testing, trialing and prototyping. But I don’t know if it necessarily gives you the push that says, “Okay, let’s take this out to market and really move away from the safety net of doing this within a larger company.”

I think it’s nice to start a project in there. But if you really want to get the feeling of true entrepreneurship, going out on your own and maybe taking some of the knowledge and the tests that you’ve done, and creating something totally new outside of that umbrella is actually the best of both worlds. It gives you a little bit more confidence that what you’re putting out in the market has had some validation beforehand.

I don’t think we’ll ever escape the Google alum title. It is a core part of our story.

There’s a lot of debate in the industry about the best form factor for autonomous delivery. Why do you back sidewalk delivery?

I think being on the bike path or even on the road creates some barriers to entry. Sidewalks, to us, seem like the best way to get to an origin and an end destination. So that’s kind of where we’ve landed.

We have spent a lot of time working on our form factor to make sure that it’s not cumbersome and not a nuisance on the sidewalk to strollers, wheelchairs and others that need to share the sidewalk, but that there’s enough compartment storage to transfer whatever goods we need to transfer.

A core part of our strategy is to be able to take our sensor stack, our software and autonomy, and apply it to other form factors. There’s not going to be a one-size-fits-all kind of solution, and there are going to be different form factors for different use cases and scenarios. We just have to be flexible to be able to adjust.

How much room is there at the moment in the market for sidewalk robots?

Even though there are a lot of companies out there, we’re still really early. I mean, it’s not like you see them in every city and suburban setting. There’s still a lot of room to grow. Right now in the near term, we’re not in a winner-take-all kind of situation.

Each robotics delivery robot company is coming up with their own niche and segment of the market that they’re tackling. It’ll be interesting to see how this shakes out in a year. This year and probably parts of next year, we’ll see everybody scale and expand, including us.

Where do you see this kind of technology applied most?

Closed campuses like universities are a great place to start. I think it really depends on where a team’s tech stack is and how far someone’s autonomy platform is.

One of the big things that we pride ourselves on is that the team we have can build a self-driving car. Being able to apply what they know on the autonomous road vehicle side and putting that into an autonomous robot on the delivery and sidewalk side — that’s where you can move outside of campus use cases make this safer for sidewalks.

As you know, we’re operating in Miami in the Brickell area. It’s not an easy place to navigate, and being able to pressure test in an environment like that shows that with the right team and the right tech in place, you can take this outside of confined spaces, outside of campuses.

 

What trends are you seeing in the space, and what do you predict the next year has in store?

The biggest trend in the last couple of years is that a lot of companies are ready to take the leap and apply autonomous robots to their operations. We’re seeing more demand than supply. Right now there’s this nice intersection of robotics companies carving out segments based on their strengths and customers willing to pilot. So it’ll be nice to see where everyone lands.

Another trend we’re seeing is that there are increasing gig-style opportunities and flexibility in schedules. We’re hearing from our customers that workers aren’t really looking for full-time hours anymore, since they have a variety of options to create a job mix that includes working at two to three different places. With this trend, we see robots providing a predictable workforce to partner with more transitional staff.

There are a few sidewalk delivery robot companies like Tortoise or Coco that rely more on tele-assist and remote operators rather than a pure autonomous play. What do you think about using remote operators?

We’re operating in scenarios where it’s fully autonomous and just monitored for safety or help here and there. It’s mostly autonomous except for when there are situations like new construction or certain parts of the path have changed. In those situations, our operators will come and help navigate around, but then those things go back into the learning of the model.

We definitely use our operators in early deployments and for mapping areas as well, and that just helps us deploy faster. It’s one of those things where we can drop a robot today in an area and operate tomorrow. We can do those things very quickly, and, in parallel, scale the autonomy to start off driving, move it in a semi-autonomous way, and move it to a fully autonomous state by having operators do that for us.

A lot of sidewalk robot applications are being used to deliver food from restaurants or what have you. Is there a bigger opportunity that’s being overlooked here?

Food delivery is a perfect place to start, because one order fits in that size, but there are so many avenues that can be explored here. We’ve heard of a use case where in railway stations, they need help transferring some of the tools and maintenance items from where the trains are actually getting repaired and fixed to where the storage units are. So it’s not just bringing food to an end consumer. There are also these shuttling use cases for things completely outside of food.

Logistics is a hot area and you’re mentioning railways, so what level of interest does Cartken have in applying this kind of tech to those form factors?

That’s definitely a direction we’re heading in. We’re looking at how we can apply our vision systems, our tech stack, our autonomy stack on form factors that we develop, but also form factors that are developed by someone else. That really speaks to what our core competency is and how we want to evolve within this market.

We don’t want to necessarily be pigeonholed into just food delivery. We want to be able to go into logistics and any kind of shuttling that involves a transfer of goods over a short distance in a way that is inefficient for a human to just go back and forth. For example, we’re looking at supporting micro-fulfillment centers or shuttling curbside.

Would you say then that your software stack is the most important piece of the puzzle for scaling?

The stack we’ve built, everything is built in-house and is completely integrated. There’s nothing that we’re really outsourcing. On the hardware side, we have a great prototyping function that allows us to create something new very quickly.

We’re leaning heavily on this platform play and making sure that we continue to build all of that internally versus outsourcing so we can adapt to what the market wants us to do. If there were any piece of it that was outsourced to any sort of third party, we would be dependent on different API integrations and what the third party is limited by.

How does your partnership with Mitsubishi work? Are you just creating the tech for them to deploy?

The robot and the tech stack and everything are all ours, so the partnership with Mitsubishi is really a distribution partnership. They’re on the ground, taking the robot to different potential customers or showing it to government agencies. There’s a lot of legislation in Japan that they’re looking to help bring forward. Then the customer at the mall are the ones deploying robots initially in that use case. So in one sense, they’re acting as an on-ground implementation partner and a distribution partner in the near term.

But because they are also very tech centric, they’re able to suggest certain modifications that are needed for the Japanese market. The other thing is that in the long term, Mitsubishi has a lot of infrastructure technology that we can integrate with, like with their elevators, which is one of the near-term things. But there are lots of other places that we’re brainstorming on how we can partner.

Cartken is still a pretty new startup and you’re already in Miami, in the Netherlands, in Japan. Why this mixed country, mixed region approach?

It’s honestly been inbound opportunities. It’s not something that we planned for. Our initial strategy was to stay more regionally focused, but when you have someone like Mitsubishi come to you to look at your product and you take the next step and realize there’s a real great synergy there, I mean, we’re not going to say “no.”

Even with the other partnerships that we have developing, we’re seeing the kind of partner that works well for us, and that’s really what’s driving this expansion. I think it’s actually a good thing, seeing how we were able to go to Japan in this way, because it opens up other parts of Europe, other parts of North America. I don’t think that we’ll restrict ourselves geographically.

I’ve noticed that Cartken hasn’t shared much about its funding and has so far only announced a seed round.

The way we’re really thinking about it is we’re fundraising to meet demand right now. We’re at this inflection point where we’re understanding what the market is needing, what demands we’re seeing for us specifically, and so we will probably fundraise at some point this year to build our teams.

Where do you expect Cartken to be a year from now?

This next year is going to be our most important so far, because we’re moving from our entry phase to graduating to a phase that is more focused on scale. The themes of this year revolve around expanding and evolving within this market. We seek to shape the way people view autonomous delivery robots outside of food delivery and narrow use cases. We’re developing different formats where systems haven’t seen these robots yet, and exploring ways to be a part of a customer’s entire ecosystem.