500 Delivery Robots, One Seven-Year Deal: How Robot.com Is Betting Big on Campus Streets

Key points

• Robot.com signed a seven-year commercial agreement with Sodexo Group, its largest single enterprise deployment to date.
• Robot.com's sidewalk delivery robot, the R-Kiwi, has completed 2.4 million delivery tasks across campuses and city streets.
• The company has deployed more than 500 R-Kiwi robots and logged 250,000 revenue-generating operational hours in the first half of this year alone.
• A new four-legged robot called R-Dog is planned to join the fleet, able to climb stairs and drop off packages without the recipient needing to open a hatch.
• Robot.com also plans to expand into industrial settings and humanoid robots, using the same customer base it built through food delivery.

Imagine ordering a burrito between lectures and watching a knee-high wheeled box trundle across the quad to deliver it. That is already everyday life on some North American college campuses, and it is about to get a lot more common.

Robot.com, a San Francisco company founded in 2017 under the name Kiwibot, has just announced a seven-year commercial deal with Sodexo Group, the global food-services company that runs cafeterias and facilities on hundreds of university campuses. The Robot Report first reported details of the agreement.

Why seven years? That is a long commitment.

Sodexo employs around 400,000 people worldwide and 120,000 full-time staff in the United States alone, yet it still struggles to fill open positions. Robot.com's CEO, Felipe Chavez Cortes, says that labor shortage is exactly why Sodexo is ready for a long-term robotic partnership.

"Seven-year contracts don't come right away," Cortes told The Robot Report. "It was a learning process for both companies on what it takes to implement robotics."

The two organisations have worked together since 2021, giving both sides four years to work out the kinks before locking in a decade-scale commitment. This new deal is Robot.com's largest single enterprise deployment.

What keeps these robots from becoming an expensive science experiment?

The economics of delivery robots have tripped up plenty of companies. Starship Technologies, one of the best-known campus robot operators, recently announced it was pulling back from universities to focus on grocery deliveries instead.

Robot.com's answer is a platform it calls Remi, short for Robot Implementation Intelligence. Think of it as the operating system that sits behind every robot, mixing navigation software from specialist partners with an advertising layer that lets companies display messages on the robot's screen.

"We can increase our revenue when we mix advertising in, so we don't just get revenue from delivery," said Cortes. That dual income stream is what makes the maths work.

Keeping more than 500 machines running smoothly also requires layers of oversight: staff on location, remote human operators who can take control of a robot that gets confused, and AI agents (software programs that can make decisions and act on their own) that flag problems before they become breakdowns. Robot.com has partnered with specialist firms Field AI and Physical Intelligence to meet its safety targets.

What is coming next for the fleet?

Right now the R-Kiwi is a wheeled box that you walk up to and collect your order from. The next machine is very different.

The R-Dog is a four-legged robot that can climb stairs, ride inside autonomous vehicles without any modifications, and actually drop a package on your doorstep rather than waiting for you to open a hatch. That opens the door to delivering a much wider range of items.

Beyond R-Dog, Robot.com is also developing R-noid, a humanoid robot with a wheeled base and two arms, aimed at the same campus and facilities customers it already serves.

Cortes frames campuses as a training ground, not a final destination. "When we jump into industrial cases, it's actually much easier," he said. Controlled warehouses and factories are a natural next step for technology already battle-tested on unpredictable quad paths in the rain.

For students on campus today, the practical takeaway is simple: the robot that brings your lunch is not going anywhere, and it is probably bringing a few friends.

Common questions

Do these robots take jobs from human delivery workers?

Cortes argues the robots fill roles that Sodexo cannot hire humans to do, because of genuine labour shortages rather than cost-cutting. The technology supplements existing staff rather than replacing a full workforce, at least in current deployments.

How safe are the robots around pedestrians?

Robot.com uses a layered safety system combining on-site staff, remote human operators who can take control instantly, and AI monitoring software. The company has also brought in external specialist firms to hit its safety benchmarks as it moves into more complex environments.