• Kiwibot, an autonomous last-mile delivery droid manufacturer,  has announced plans to begin an autonomous food delivery service at the New Mexico State University (NMSU) campus in partnership with Sodexo, the foodservice and facilities management company serving the university. This marks the company's first university deployment in New Mexico and its largest deployment to date.

• The company plans to launch a fleet of approximately 25 droids later this month as the fall semester begins, delivering food orders to students and staff from selected Sodexo serviced locations. Food can be ordered via the Sodexo app at a delivery fee of USD 2 plus 10% of the order value, with the company promising delivery within 20–35 minutes of ordering.

• Kiwibot plans to scale up operations to include 30–50 droid units and more than 10 food outlets across the campus, including Subway and Chick-fil-A in the future.

<ul><li>Kiwibot develops semi-autonomous droids mainly targeting food delivery at university campuses. Its latest version of Kiwibot, launched in April , has been upgraded to Level 3 autonomy (i.e., needs remote assistance from a human operator) and includes onboard cameras, lights, speakers, sensors, and artificial intelligence (AI) for safe navigation and interaction. Since its establishment in 2017, Kiwibots have conducted more than 150,000 food deliveries as of April 2021.</ul>

<ul><li> Analyst Quicktake: This is Kiwibot’s third campus partnership, while its peers, Starship and incumbent Yandex (which develops a similar droid), have also adopted similar strategies. Two weeks ago, Starship expanded its operations to include the University of Nevada-Reno (UNR) , its 16th university deployment, while Yandex announced a similar, but much larger, partnership with food delivery company Grubhub , in July to deploy its delivery droids at 250 campuses across the US. Moreover, partnering with Sodexo for university rollouts has been a common strategy among players, as the company offers dining services for approximately 600 colleges and universities across North America. Kiwibot partnered with the company when launching the service at the University of Denver in September 2020, while Starship has also partnered with Sodexo for several university deployments.</ul>