An Estonian-founded company with large UK operations whose small six-wheeled sidewalk robots deliver groceries and takeaway food, first launched commercially in Milton Keynes.
Starship Technologies makes the small, six-wheeled delivery robots that trundle along pavements carrying groceries and takeaway food. Someone orders on an app, a robot drives itself to their door and they unlock it with a code or their phone. The robots are electric, travel at walking pace, weigh about 25 kg empty and carry up to about 9 kg of shopping. They use cameras, radar and other sensors to cross roads and avoid people, with remote human help as a backup. The company says it has passed 10 million deliveries with about 3,000 robots in eight countries.
Starship was launched in 2014 by Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis, the co-founders of Skype. Mr Heinla was inspired by a NASA competition to build a robot that could collect dust samples on Mars, and decided to use the same thinking for a delivery robot on Earth. He is still the chief executive. The company describes its shared goal as to 'revolutionise last-mile delivery', making short deliveries cheaper, faster, more accessible and more sustainable. Its first commercial service started in Milton Keynes in 2018.
The UK is one of Starship's most important places. Milton Keynes was the first commercial service, with partners including the Co-op and Tesco, and in March 2020 it became the first robot delivery service to run in a British town centre. A study with Milton Keynes Council between 2018 and 2021 credited the robots with preventing about 280,000 car journeys and saving 137 tonnes of carbon dioxide. A Wikipedia entry says that by March 2023 robots were delivering in seven British cities, but it does not name them, and a separate report spoke of a launch in Yorkshire. The company's business and engineering headquarters are in Estonia, with research and development in Helsinki, so UK roles are likely to be about running operations rather than designing the robots.
On culture, Starship's own page describes a diverse team of innovators, engineers and visionaries working across countries in cross-functional teams that mix robotics, artificial intelligence and logistics. Its leadership page lists people for finance, revenue, legal, people operations, cloud software and operations. It does not list stated values. In 2020 it laid off some staff during the pandemic and rehired many of them about six months later, which is part of its real story. Charities such as Living Streets raised concerns in 2026 about robots on crowded pavements as the company planned to grow.
The jobs at a delivery-robot company include robotics and software engineers, remote operators who keep an eye on robots in the field, local operations teams who charge, clean and service the fleet, partnership managers who work with shops and food brands, and people in finance, legal and people teams. Practical, hands-on skills as well as computing and engineering matter. The company's website is the place to check where UK roles currently sit.
Website: www.starship.xyz
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