Xiaodong Lan, a robotics engineer whose LinkedIn profile says he is still at Dispatch, is mentioned in the resume of his PhD mentor as now working as a research engineer at Amazon.Īmazon’s robot has superficial physical differences from Dispatch’s. Six days later, Braun surrendered Dispatch’s business registration in California.ĭispatch’s founders and employees have kept a very low profile since then, although the available evidence points to them having moved with the company.īraun registered to vote in Seattle last fall. Dispatch’s sole patent was transferred to Amazon Technologies, Amazon’s R&D subsidiary, on November 22, 2017. Public records suggest that Amazon acquired the company around the same time. The Dispatch website is still live, however, and none of the founders have updated their LinkedIn profiles. The Menlo College pilot finished, and the university has not had contact with Dispatch since. Baalke made his last tweet in June, and the official Dispatch Twitter account fell silent at the start of August 2017. Then in 2017, everything suddenly went quiet. The company appeared to be on the verge of becoming a major player in robotic delivery. Dispatch grew to around 10 employees, and late that year, filed its first patent application. With successful tests behind it, the company secured a $2 million seed round in early 2016 from VCs at Andreessen Horowitz and Precursor Ventures. The devices had something of a following on our campus - literally and otherwise.” Steven Weiner, president of Menlo College, told TechCrunch its pilot was “both utilitarian as well as engaging. Dispatch launched pilot programs on two college campuses in California - ideal environments to perfect their robot without having to navigate public rules and regulations. Within six months, they had moved the company to South San Francisco and, with the help of mechatronics engineer Buddy Gardineer, built an electric semi-autonomous robot called Carry that could transport up to 100 pounds. In the spring of 2015, they incorporated Dispatch Inc., in the Californian seaside town of Marina. The trio realized they had all the necessary skills to build a U.S. Now, that connection appears especially ironic in light of Dispatch and its own origin story.īack in 2014, when Starship Technologies first revealed its prototype urban delivery robot, it caught the attention of three young engineers who were working together at a New York real estate visualization company: Stav Braun, a computer vision expert Uriah Baalke, an alumnus of legendary robotics lab Willow Garage and Sonia Jin, a computer scientist from MIT. It would not provide further details. The Dispatch.AI website is still active - and press reports have even called its robot a rival to Scout - but the people behind Dispatch have actually been working for Amazon for well over a year.Īmazon’s debut of Scout last month drew initial comparisons between it and another delivery robot made by Estonian startup Starship Technologies, and some even wondered if Amazon was working with the startup. Īmazon has confirmed to TechCrunch that it acquired Dispatch. TechCrunch has discovered that Amazon stealthily acquired an urban delivery robot startup called Dispatch in 2017, bringing in both IP and talent from the company to the e-commerce giant. “We developed Amazon Scout at our research and development lab in Seattle.”īut that’s not the whole story. “These devices were created by Amazon,” the page reads. When Amazon unveiled a six-wheeled urban delivery robot called Scout a couple of weeks ago, its website was pretty definitive about who was behind it.
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