Vayu Robotics claims a first with debut of on-road delivery robot and inks deal with major e-commerce player

Vayu Robotics has announced the release of what is pitched as the world’s first on-road delivery robot that combines AI foundation models with lidar less, low cost passive sensors. 

This operates autonomously without pre-mapping the roads it intends to drive on and is capable of navigating inside stores, on city streets, and unloading packages on driveways or porches, carrying up to 100 lbs at under 20mph.

Vayu was co-founded by three veterans from the robotics and mobility industry, Anand Gopalan, former CEO who took lidar supplier Velodyne public in 2020, Mahesh Krishnamurthi, formerly of Apple SPG and Lyft, and Nitish Srivastava, also from Apple SPG and Geoffrey Hinton’s AI lab in the University of Toronto.

Hinton is also an advisor to the company.

After working in major robotics and autonomy software for two decades, the trio came to the conclusion that large volume robotics applications, like robotics delivery, could only be unlocked by inventing a new technology stack that involved lower cost hardware and more robust software. 

“The unique set of technologies we have developed at Vayu have allowed us to solve problems that have plagued delivery robots over the past decade, and finally create a solution that can actually be deployed at scale and enable the cheap transport of goods everywhere” says Gopalan.

The company recently signed what is said to be a substantial commercial agreement with a large e-commerce player to deploy 2,500 robots to enable ultra-fast goods delivery, and similar commercial customers are in the pipeline.

The team is also working with a leading global robotics manufacturer to replace lidar sensors with Vayu’s sensing technology for other robotic applications. 

“We believe in backing businesses where critical and differentiated technologies can unlock a large market. Vayu is a great example of this where they have deployed novel sensing and their AI foundation models to a robotic challenge that can have immense economic and societal impact,” says Kanu Gulati, Partner at Khosla Ventures.  

Gopalan says: “Our software is robot form factor agnostic and we have already deployed it across several wheeled form factors.In the near future, Vayu's software technology will enable the movement of quadrupedal and bipedal robots, allowing us to expand into those markets as well.”

Vayu has previously raised $12.7 million.

Looking ahead, its founders believe their system can also power a new wave of mobile robots in other use cases. “Autonomous delivery robots are only the tip of the iceberg,” says Gopalan.