Autonomous robotic startup CartkenKnown for his Four -wheeled robots Who provide food on university campuses and through the lively streets of Tokyo, he has found a new area of interest: industrialists.

Co-Fondatore and Ceo of Cartken, Christian Bersch, told Techcrunch that the application of his delivery robots to industrial contexts was always in the back of his mind, Asy built the startup. When companies started reaching the use of their factory robots and workshops, Cartken took a closer look.

“What we have discovered is that in reality there is a real great necessity in industrial and on-site uses,” said Bersch, who co-discontinued the startup together with other Google Engineers forms Behind the Bookbot project. “Sometimes there are also [been] A more direct value for companies that optimize their material flows or their production flows. “

In 2023, the startup obtained its first large customer of Industries, the German manufacturing company ZF Lifetec. Initially, Zf Lifetec has used its existing delivery robots, called Cartken Courier, which can contain 44 pounds and recalls an igloo cooling device on wheels.

“Our food delivery robot has started to move production samples around and quickly transforms into our busiest robot of everyone,” Bersch said. “It is then that we said, hey, there are cases of real use and a real market market, and it is then that we started to target that segment more and more.”

At the time, Cartken was still pressing forward in its sector of the delivery sidewalk, including Partnership with Uber Eats And Grubhub for his delivery operations of the last Moile in the United States and Japan university campus.

But that first success with ZF, encouraged startup founders, who included Jake Stelman, Jonas Witt and Anjali Naik, to expand his business model. Changing the cartken robots from delivery of food to an industrial environment, it was not a challenge, Bersch said. Artificial intelligence behind robots is trained on years of food delivery data and devices are designed to cross various weather and meteorological conditions.

This means that robots can travel between internal and external sets. And thanks to the data collected by the delivery of food on the streets of Tokyo, the robots are able to react and maneuver the obstacles surround.

Cartken, who collected over $ 20 million from 468 capital, incubate fund, sailing partners and other venture capital companies, began to build his robotic fleet to reflect his industrial pivot. The company released the conveyor cartken at the beginning of this year, which is a larger version than the Corterken courier and can contain up to 660 pounds. The company also released the Cartken Runner, designed for indoor deliveries, and is also working on something similar to a robotic lift trolley.

“We have a navigable navigable stack for different robots size,” Bersch said. “All artificial intelligence and automatic learning and training that have gone to this are like moving directly to other robots.”

Cartken recently Annovéd that he was depousing his four -year relationship with the Japanese car manufacturer Mitsubishi, who originally helped the company to obtain the certifications necessary to manage their delivery robots on the streets of Tokyo.

Melco Mobility Solutions, a company under the Mitsubishi umbrella, has just announced that it will buy almost 100 Cartken transport robots For use in Japanese industrial structures.

“We certainly see a lot of traction in various industrial and corporate sites, from car companies to chemical pharmaceutical pharmaceuticals,” he said. “All these companies generally have people who move stuff from one building to another, who is by hand, on a trolley or a small elevator trolley, and it is really what we are targeting.

Cartken will continue his activity of delivery of the last mile, but he will not expand it, said Bersch, adding that they still do many tests for new skills on the existing thesis of delivery paths of the last Moile.