Autonomous robotics startup Cartken, known for its four-wheeled robots that deliver food on college campuses and through Tokyo’s bustling streets, has found a new area of focus: industrials.
Cartken co-founder and CEO Christian Bersch told TechCrunch that applying its delivery robots to industrial settings was always in the back of his mind as they built the startup. When companies started reaching out about using their robots in factories and labs, Cartken took a closer look.
“What we found is that actually there’s a real big need in industrial and onsite use cases,” said Bersch, who co-founded the startup along with other former Google engineers behind the Bookbot project. “Sometimes there have even [been] more direct value to companies optimizing their material flows or their production flows.”
In 2023, the startup landed its first big industrial customer, German manufacturing company ZF Lifetec. Initially, ZF Lifetec used its existing delivery robots, called the Cartken Courier, which can hold 44 pounds and resembles an Igloo cooler on wheels.
“Our food delivery robot started moving production samples around, and it’s quickly turned into our busiest robot of all,” Bersch said. “That’s when we said, hey, there’s like real use cases and real market need behind it, and that’s when we started targeting that segment more and more.”
At the time, Cartken was still pressing ahead on its delivery sidewalk business, including locking in partnerships with Uber Eats and GrubHub for its last-mile delivery operations across U.S. college campuses and in Japan.
But that early success with ZF, encouraged the startup founders, which includes Jake Stelman, Jonas Witt and Anjali Naik, to expand its business model. Switching Cartken’s robots from food delivery to an industrial setting, wasn’t much of a challenge, Bersch said. The AI behind the robots is trained on years of food delivery data and the devices are designed to traverse various terrains and weather conditions.
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