Cartken Courier

Cartken (Oakland, California; founded 2019 by ex-Google engineers from the Bookbot project, led by CEO Christian Bersch; about $22.5 million raised from investors including Magna International, Shell Ventures, and Mitsubishi Electric) makes six-wheeled autonomous sidewalk delivery robots. Its Cartken Courier is the original sidewalk bot carrying about 44 pounds at 3 to 6 miles per hour, joined by the larger industrial Cartken Hauler with a 660-pound payload and an indoor Cartken Runner. It ran campus and food sidewalk delivery at scale, including a 41-robot fleet at the University of Arizona via Grubhub and Uber Eats service in Miami and Tokyo, but in July 2025 it pivoted its growth focus from last-mile food delivery to industrial robotics, with food delivery continuing but no longer expanding. The registry records it at commercial maturity with a finding that corrects the sector's captive-service premise: Cartken is not a classic captive operator, its legacy campus business was robots-as-a-service, and its forward business is industrial robot sales, anchored by a multi-million-dollar order from Melco, a Mitsubishi Electric Group company, for nearly 100 Cartken Hauler robots placed on June 25, 2025, an outright sale rather than a service, following a first industrial customer in Germany's ZF Lifetec in 2023. The frequently cited figure of more than 50,000 orders at the University of Arizona is company and BusinessWire PR, with Grubhub corroborating the program but not the count, and the current fleet size, total lifetime deliveries, whether the roughly 100 Haulers have actually been deployed rather than merely ordered, and whether the Miami service is still live in 2026 are not verified.

Yes. Cartken Courier is independently verified in real-world operation on the DEPLOY registry, confirmed at named deployment sites with primary sources: not a concept, render, or demo-only.

Yes. DEPLOY independently verifies Cartken Courier performing Delivers packages autonomously, with no human in the loop.

Cartken Courier's recorded specifications on the DEPLOY registry: Runtime: 16 h; Max speed: 7.2 km/h; Payload: 80. See the Specs section for the full sourced set.

Cartken Courier is made by Cartken, based in Oakland, California, USA, founded in 2019.

6 verified deployments of Cartken Courier are on the DEPLOY registry, including at Tsukuba, Japan, Tokyo, Japan, Fairfax, Virginia, USA.

Cartken Courier is in commercial deployment and is sold to operators; contact the manufacturer to buy, and see the pricing section for any recorded price.

On the DEPLOY registry, comparable sidewalk robots to Cartken Courier include Starship Bot, Serve Gen 3, Avride delivery robot, Starship Delivery Robot.

Cartken Courier and Starship Bot (Starship Technologies · 41 deployments) are both sidewalk robots on the DEPLOY registry. Cartken Courier has 6 verified deployments on record. Compare both records for specs, safety, deployments, and verified-vs-claimed autonomy.

On DEPLOY's intelligence score, which blends verified deployments, safety, adoption, media, and IP signals, Cartken Courier ranks in roughly the top 17% of sidewalk models tracked by the registry.

Cartken Courier is at the commercial stage on the DEPLOY maturity ladder (research, prototype, pilot, commercial, production). Commercial stage means production-grade deployments are operating at named customer sites.

Cartken Courier has no incidents on record in the DEPLOY registry. This does not constitute a safety guarantee; it reflects the incidents DEPLOY has tracked and verified to date.

Cartken builds autonomous mobile robots for outdoor and indoor use. Originally focused on last-mile food delivery via Uber Eats, Cartken pivoted to industrial logistics across factories, labs, and warehouses. The robots can travel anywhere a pedestrian can, including sidewalks, bike lanes, and crosswalks. AI trained on years of food delivery data.