Bolt and Starship sign commercial partnership as first step in collaboration between two of Estonia’s most innovative companies
LONDON & TALLINN, ESTONIA | 21 June 2023
Starship Technologies, the world’s leading provider of autonomous delivery services, has today announced a new partnership with Bolt, the first European mobility super-app. As the initial first step of the evolving collaboration, Bolt and Starship have signed a commercial partnership opening the door to thousands of robots doing Bolt Food deliveries across multiple countries, starting this year.
Today’s announcement coincides with Starship celebrating another industry first milestone, having become the first company offering autonomous delivery to complete 5 million commercial deliveries around the world. This landmark has been achieved just seven months since Starship marked 4 million deliveries in November 2022, demonstrating the ongoing and ever-increasing demand for such services.
Bolt has more than 100 million customers in over 45 countries and 500 cities around the world, including in Europe, Africa, West Asia and Latin America. The company offers a range of mobility services including ride hailing, micromobility (e-scooter and e-bike rentals), food and grocery delivery and a free-floating car-sharing service. The partnership with Starship means Bolt will now be able to offer a full range of multi-modal delivery options depending on basket size and distance, ultimately increasing profitability per delivery.
“Both Bolt and Starship have created innovative products which have revolutionised the way people move around and buy and receive goods in cities”, said Jevgeni Kabanov, Bolt’s President. “We’re excited to bring our two services together through this new collaboration, which will provide millions of Bolt Food customers with a new, sustainable delivery option fulfilled by Starship’s smart and much-loved service which has had great success over the past five years. In the longer term we are hopeful about expanding our collaboration to make deliveries cheaper and more accessible to even more customers.”
Alastair Westgarth, CEO of Starship Technologies, said: “Bolt and Starship share very similar goals of making local transportation more sustainable. In our case, we provide a convenient and on-demand autonomous delivery service.
Ahti Heinla, Co-founder and CTO of Starship Technologies, added: “We think the synergy with Bolt’s overall portfolio of services will not only help Starship expand to new markets but also provide some fun, fully electric, future proofed delivery options to the markets Bolt serves.”
Starship Technologies and Bolt share Estonian roots, a country now well known on the global stage for its digital innovation and being home to more tech unicorns per capita than any other country in the world. In addition to Bolt, other tech unicorns from Estonia include Skype, the previous company of Starship’s co-founders.
Starship’s 2,000+ fleet of robots have been operating at the L4 level of autonomous driving since 2018, completing 140,000 road crossings globally every day. In April 2023, the company announced that its robots had passed the 10 million km mark (over 6 million miles) in terms of distance travelled around the world. This is more than six times that of the 1 million mile mark recently announced by international self-driving car developers, Waymo and Cruise,
Starship Technologies recently expanded its service in the UK to Wakefield, with the robots already a common sight in Milton Keynes, Northampton, Bedford, Cambourne, Cambridge, Leeds and Trafford, as well as multiple university campuses across the US. In total, Starship is now operational in more than 50 service areas globally, allowing millions of people to access delivery robots on a daily basis.
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ABOUT STARSHIP TECHNOLOGIES
Starship Technologies is revolutionising deliveries with autonomous robots. The robots are designed to deliver food, groceries and packages locally in minutes. The delivery robots have travelled millions of miles and completed five million autonomous deliveries around the world. Starship was founded by Ahti Heinla (Skype chief architect) and Janus Friis (Skype co-founder) and Alastair Westgarth is the CEO.
Website: https://www.starship.xyz
Facebook: @StarshipTechnologies
Twitter: @StarshipRobots
Instagram: @starshiprobots
ABOUT BOLT
Bolt is a super-app with over 100 million customers in more than 45 countries and 500 cities across Europe and Africa (list of locations here). We offer a range of mobility products for different services and needs:
- Ride-hailing
- Rentals (scooter and e-bike sharing)
- Bolt Food, delivering ready-made meals from restaurants
- Bolt Market, our grocery delivery service
- Bolt Drive, car rental service
- Bolt Business, our corporate mobility service
MEDIA CONTACTS
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Liberty Communications
