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Tech Roundup: Recruit invests in delivery robot firm; DoorDash acquires autonomous vehicle startup

August 21, 2019

Recruit Holdings Co. Ltd., one of the world’s largest staffing providers and owner of Indeed, announced an investment in a company that provides autonomous delivery robots. Separately, human cloud firm DoorDash acquired Scotty Labs, a company with a focus on self-driving vehicles. Here are more details:

Recruit Holdings Co. Ltd.

Recruit announced an investment today in Starship Technologies Inc., a San Francisco-based company that provides autonomous delivery robots.

Business Insider had reported on Tuesday that Starship announced a $40 million funding round. The company was founded by Skype cofounders.

Starship’s robots are designed to deliver food, groceries and packages locally within minutes. Its robots have now completed 100,000 deliveries, according to Recruit. The robots drive autonomously but are monitored by humans who can take control at any time. The company was started in July 2014.

It plans to launch robots on 100 college campuses in the next 24 months.

DoorDash

Human cloud, food delivery firm DoorDash has acquired startup Scotty Labs, a tech company that aims to enable people to drive self-driving cars remotely, according to a post on Medium by Scotty Labs co-founder and CEO Tobenna Arodiogbu.

“Our core belief at Scotty has always been that autonomy plus remote assistance will be the future of logistics,” Arodiogbu wrote in the post. “We have intentionally always considered ourselves to be the anti-hype company and focused intensely on developing core infrastructure and algorithms, with a healthy degree of human intelligence, to ensure the safe deployment of autonomous vehicles.”

One investor in Scotty Labs had been Gradient Ventures, Google’s AI fund.