Robotic delivery bot maker Ottonomy secured $3.3 million in a second investment round and previewed its next delivery robot.
CEO Ritukar Vijay said there is a major need for robotics on campuses, in parking lots and in places like airports—maybe more so than door-to-door delivery.
“If you think about door-to-door delivery retail, that’s a minimal use case,” said co-founder and CEO Ritukar Vijay. “That doesn’t resonate or connect with the large corporate population where these [robots] can get inside the facility. They need to be inside the facility or store itself.”
The company has been piloting robotic delivery in such spaces, getting air travelers their food, getting people in parking lots their curbside orders and delivering on other campuses since 2020.
Under that model and through those pilots, Vijay said the company has learned a lot. One thing he said the team paid attention to is maneuvering around humans, and anyone that has ever traveled knows that’s especially difficult in an airport. In the next iteration of the company’s delivery bot, Ottobot 2.0, there is increased mobility, including what the company calls “crab mode,” e.g., the ability to move horizontally while continuing forward.
He said there is also more access for customers and more options for delivery partners like modular, customizable cabins inside the robot.
“Introducing Ottobot 2.0, we are bringing best-in-class maneuverability, accessibility and modularity to our fully autonomous robots, which sets us ahead of our competition,” said Vijay in a press release.
The new funding brings the total raised by Ottonomy to $4.8 million. The latest round was led by Pi Ventures, which was joined by Connetic Ventures, Branded Hospitality Ventures and Sangeet Kumar, the founder and CEO of Addverb Technologies, a robotics company.
See a video of the new bot in action below, including a demonstration of “crab mode.”
