© 2023 Cartken Inc.
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June 22, 2023
Over the past year, our team has been really busy: we’ve grown our fleet, partnered with industry leaders like Uber Eats, Grubhub, and Mitsubishi Electric, further developed our edge AI tech stack, grown our annual recurring revenue by over 10x, and reached over 25K deliveries in a month.
Given all this recent momentum, we wanted to take a step back and provide our community with an update on the latest milestones and news that we have recently achieved at Cartken.
Our Edge-AI system now enables Level 4 autonomy on sidewalks with only cameras, making us one of the few companies in the small autonomous vehicle delivery space to achieve this level of autonomy with a purely vision-based system. Level 4 autonomy is significant because it indicates that our vehicles are equipped to handle all tasks in mapped areas, without human teleoperators actively driving robots.
This breakthrough means that our robots can operate independently on sidewalks, without the need for human intervention, even in complex situations with a lot of pedestrian traffic. Most other players that we are familiar with rely on LiDAR, but we have chosen to use a camera-based system instead. We believe that this decision has helped us reduce the cost and complexity of our robots while still achieving high levels of performance and safety.
Our camera system works by using AI models for object detection and localization algorithms to perceive and navigate the environment. This system has been trained on hundreds of thousands of images and has been optimized to detect and respond to various obstacles, pedestrians, and traffic signals on the sidewalk. Furthermore, this camera-based system is an important step in safety, as it also allows our robots to finish street crossings even when the remote connection to the monitoring team drops.
Additionally, these technical updates enable us to keep building towards a more sustainable future for ecommerce. We see autonomous micromobility as a key lever for decarbonization, as it transforms last-mile transportation into a much greener process.
Just within just the last-mile delivery space FedEx, UPS, and Amazon alone release approximately 4.5 megatons of CO2/year according to the Clean Mobility Collective (CMC) and the Stand.earth Research Group. Additionally, further CO2 can be saved by reducing the number of car trips people make to the store or to get takeout. According to the US Bureau of Transportation, 45% of all car trips are for shopping and running errands. We are working to help reduce this number of car trips by offering a more cost-effective delivery option.
Our robots are even a lot more energy efficient than electric cars, as they are purpose-built for the delivery task, just needing to transport a few pounds of cargo rather than carrying the full weight of a driver. A Cartken robot uses less than 1/10th of the electricity per mile than a Tesla Model 3.
Something we think a lot about at Cartken is the breakdown of the supply chain and our role in changing last-mile delivery. Long-haul transport has become extremely cost-efficient due to containerization and automation that has happened over the last 50 years. We didn’t go from legions of dock workers unloading cargo ships to the highly automated global shipping network we have today in a matter of days. It took decades, but the impact was enormous as it laid the foundation for today’s globalized economy.
Today it only takes 24¢ to ship a pound of bananas 5,000 miles from South America to a local US supermarket. In contrast, it still costs an American consumer $5-10 to get that same amount of bananas delivered the two miles between a local store and their home.
Tied to this, and to our technological breakthroughs summarized above, we want to share that we have achieved profitability with our delivery operations. There are a variety of factors that have enabled us to reach this point. Our high level of autonomy minimizes the cost of monitoring staff, while our fleet optimization algorithms enable robots to be used across an area as efficiently as possible. Moreover, our energy-efficient system and all-day battery life allow each robot to complete more deliveries than ever before. Together, these updates have made our deliveries profitable, including paying off our robot hardware.
This has created an environment where we have been able to grow our annual recurring revenue this past year by over 10x YoY. Our delivery volume has also seen significant growth, surpassing 25,000 deliveries per month. We believe these numbers reflect the growing demand for autonomous delivery solutions.
At Cartken, we remain committed to pushing the boundaries of autonomous delivery technology to more people and businesses around the world. We are dedicated to creating solutions that are safe, efficient, sustainable, and cost-effective. Thank you to our community for your continued support as we strive to create a better future for autonomous delivery.
© 2024 Cartken Inc.