'Delivery robots will happen': Skype co-founder on his fast-growing venture Starship C ity dwellers around the world have long been used to rapid delivery of takeaway food and, increasingly, groceries. But what they are not entirely used to - yet - is the sight of a robot pulling up to their front door. The co-founder of Skype, Ahti Heinla, believes his new venture is about to change that. Heinla is the chief executive of Starship Technologies, a startup that, he claimed, is able to operate deliveries run by trundling robots at a small profit - and cheaper than a human delivery driver, even in small towns and villages where delivery has not previously been viable. "We've solved everything that there is to solve," Heinla said over lunch at a London hotel.

In the summer of 2014, Ahti Heinla, one of the software engineers who helped develop Skype, started taking photos of his house. There is nothing particularly unusual about this, of course. Only he kept on doing it. Month after month, as summer turned to fall and fall gave way to winter, Heinla went out to the same exact spot on the sidewalk and snapped new, seemingly identical pictures of his home. Was the man who had played a crucial role in building a multibillion dollar telecommunications app losing his mind?

Starship's delivery robots collect food or drinks from a business park's canteen before bringing it to the front door of a particular building. Srivathsan Canchi is one of "thousands" of office workers at the sprawling headquarters of technology firm Intuit who has been ordering his coffee from a robot. There's no need for the product manager to stand in line anymore, all the more useful since he injured his foot. Instead he opens the Starship Technologies app on his phone, and orders his caffeinated drink. Around 15 minutes later, a dog-sized robot on wheels rolls around the corner to meet Canchi at the front of his building.

Starship Technologies, a delivery robot startup founded in 2015 by two Skype co-founders, is launching its autonomous delivery service at corporate and academic campuses in Europe and the US. For the last three months, Starship's six-wheeled robots have been delivering food and office supplies around software company Intuit's 4.3-acre campus in Mountain View, California. Ahti Heinla, Starship CEO, CTO and co-founder, tells The Robot Report that Starship expects to scale this service to "hundreds of campuses" and about 1,000 robots by the end of 2018. There are 10 delivery robots that Compass pays for by the month. Heinla said Intuit's employees don't pay extra when they order food or supplies via the Starship app.

If you work in an office park, or study at a campus university, robotic delivery drivers could be coming your way, following the first-ever commercial deployment of the technology. Starship Technologies, an autonomous delivery startup created in 2014 by two Skype co-founders, has been in public testing mode in 20 countries around the world since 2015. Now the company says it is ready for its first "major commercial rollout". Employees of finance developer Intuit in Mountain View, California, will be able to order breakfast, lunch and coffee from their staff cafeteria and have it delivered to any point in the company's Silicon Valley campus by one of Starship's 10kg six-wheeled autonomous robots. "You place your order, it's one click, then you drop a pin where you want the robot to meet you," says Starship co-founder Janus Friis. "We've seen huge demand for breakfast.