Deployment

Starship Bot at Arizona State University (Tempe)

Name: Starship Bot at Arizona State University (Tempe)
Start: 2022-01-01T00:00:00.000Z
Location: Arizona State University (Tempe)

Starship Bot is the six-wheeled autonomous sidewalk delivery robot of Starship Technologies, founded in 2014 by Skype co-founders Ahti Heinla, who is also chief executive, and Janus Friis, with headquarters in San Francisco and engineering hubs in Tallinn, Estonia and Helsinki, Finland. The robot carries an insulated cargo compartment and navigates sidewalks at low speed using multi-sensor fusion of cameras, radar, ultrasonics, and GPS, operating as an operator-supervised Level 4 system: it drives autonomously with remote human oversight and takeover available rather than being driverless, a distinction the registry preserves against Starship's own marketing of Level 4 autonomy without active human supervision.

Starship runs a captive operator-supervised service model, operating its own fleet and selling the delivery backbone to apps, retailers, and campuses rather than selling robots to third parties, integrating with platforms such as Uber Eats, Just Eat, Bolt, Foodora, Grubhub, and Wolt. As of Starship's own April 2026 disclosure it had passed ten million cumulative autonomous deliveries with more than three thousand robots across more than three hundred service areas in eight countries: the United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, the Czech Republic, and the United States, with more than sixty-five US university campuses as its anchor segment; Denmark, sometimes listed in priors, is not among them.

It remains privately held, having closed a fifty-million-dollar Series C led by Plural in October 2025 that brought cumulative funding above two hundred eighty million dollars, with no valuation disclosed by the company.

Starship Bot by Starship Technologies · Machine verified · Sidewalk delivery

Track Starship Bot at Arizona State University (Tempe)

Recent coverage

Autonomous Mobile Robots: The Future of LogisticsBen Smith, Deploy Editor · 2026-06-15
Starship Technologies: 10 million autonomous deliveries completedBen Smith, Deploy Editor · 2026-06-15
Starship Technologies ending delivery robot service at US college campusesBen Smith, Deploy Editor · 2026-06-15

See all coverage →

Starship Technologies launched a sidewalk robot delivery service on the Arizona State University Tempe campus, offering contactless food delivery in partnership with Aramark. The campus is listed among Starship's operating sites as of November 2021, and an AI Incident Database entry confirms continued campus operation as of September 2024.

Key facts

Fleet: Starship Bot sidewalk robots
Operator: Starship Technologies
Coverage: Arizona State University Tempe campus
Use Case: Contactless food delivery
Partner: Aramark
Start: Operating as of November 2021
Status: Continued operation as of September 2024

Exposure

Customer segment: retail
Scale tier: undisclosed

Each exposure value carries its own basis marker. Aggregators report a number; this surface preserves the source class so verification depth travels with the value.

Safety record

No incidents on record for Starship Bot at Arizona State University (Tempe).

Only active incidents are counted. Retracted incidents are excluded from this summary but remain reachable at their canonical URLs.

Trust tier: Machine verifiedhow tiers work →
Last updated: 2026-08-21
Model: Starship Bot
Company: Starship Technologies
Location: United States/Arizona/Arizona State University (Tempe)
Operator: Starship Technologies
Status: operational
Operator type: maker operated
Scale at site: undisclosed
Site environment: outdoor
Location precision: verified coordinates
First seen: 2022-01-01
ID: 5bfa6b0a-317a-4af7-842f-f6d697032e26

Timeline

Jan 2022
First recorded
Starship Bot first documented operating at Arizona State University (Tempe).
May 2026
created
Aug 2026
Current status: operational, reviewed
Latest recorded state. New status transitions append here as the deployment-status recorder produces them.

Claimed vs. verified

Starship Technologies claims 2,000 Starship Bot units in the field. DEPLOY has independently verified 41 deployment sites.

The gap between claimed and verified is the Fleet Reality signal. See the Fleet Reality Index.

On the deployment map

Free to use on your site, with a link back to DEPLOY.

Starship Bot operates in Arizona State University (Tempe). Explore the full verified map:

Verifications (1)

Machine verified by DEPLOY content-agent (Sprint 1.5 re-verification)2026-05-30
Evidence: https://www.starship.xyz/university-campuses/
asOf
2026-05-30
basis
Confirmed active on Starship's official university-campuses list (65 US campuses as of Feb 2026; 10M+ deliveries) and named as currently operating in independent 2024-2026 coverage.
status
active

Sources (7)

Starship campus list incl. Arizona State University · https://www.ottomate.news/p/starship-robot-delivery-now-available · 2021-11-12
AI Incident Database: Starship robot at ASU (incident context confirms campus operation) · https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/813/ · 2024-09-19
https://www.starship.xyz/press/starship-technologies-launches-robot-delivery-service-at-arizona-state-university-and-james-madison-university/
https://news.asu.edu/20200904-asu-news-starship-aramark-launch-contactless-robot-food-delivery
https://www.abc15.com/news/business/san-francisco-tech-firm-rolls-out-delivery-robots-on-asu-tempe-campus
https://www.statepress.com/article/2020/09/spcommunity-starship-robot-partnership-brings-contactless-delivery
https://www.starship.xyz/press/starship-technologies-raises-an-additional-17m-in-funding-as-it-hits-one-million-autonomous-deliveries-milestone/

Methodology: Verified · 7 sources (no primary) · last reviewed 2026-08-21

Verification posture

Verified

Low confidence

Review state

Stable

Last reviewed 2026-08-21

Maturity + lifecycle

Maturity stage: commercial

Lifecycle: active

Architectural position

Cohort: sidewalk

Sources by quality tier

7: unclassified; Unclassified source

The framework is documented at /methodology. Corrections at /corrections. Reviewer: DEPLOY editorial team.

Common questions

What is the Starship Bot deployment at Arizona State University (Tempe)?

Starship Bot, built by Starship Technologies, is recorded as a deployment at Arizona State University (Tempe) on the DEPLOY registry. Starship Technologies operates the deployment directly.

Who operates Starship Bot at Arizona State University (Tempe)?

Starship Technologies, the manufacturer of Starship Bot, operates this deployment directly. This is a maker-deploys-its-own-product arrangement rather than a customer pilot.

When did the Starship Bot deployment at Arizona State University (Tempe) go live?

The deployment is recorded as starting January 1, 2022 on the DEPLOY registry. Earlier activity may exist but is not yet sourced.

Have there been incidents at the Starship Bot deployment at Arizona State University (Tempe)?

No active incidents affecting this deployment are recorded on the DEPLOY registry. Absence of recorded incidents is not a guarantee no incident occurred; DEPLOY records only sourced incidents and suppresses retracted ones.

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Machine-readable surfaces

Markdown mirror: /deployments/starship-bot-asu-tempe.md
JSON-LD: embedded in this page’s head
REST API: /v1/robots/5bfa6b0a-317a-4af7-842f-f6d697032e26
Data documentation: /data
Query this programmatically: Deploy MCP