Cartken Courier at Tsukuba, Japan

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.