• Kiwibot, an autonomous last-mile delivery droid manufacturer, has raised USD 7.5 million in a pre-Series A funding round from five investors, including Headline, House of Lithium, and Sodexo. This brings the company’s total funds raised to USD 14 million.

• The company intends to utilize the funds for product development and to expand production to build 100 robots a month.

• Today, Kiwibot also announced a USD 20 million extended deal with investor Sodexo, a food service and facilities management company, to deploy 1,200+ Kiwibot droids at 50 university campuses across the US by the end of the year. Currently, the company has a fleet of 200 Kiwibots operating in 10 campuses in the US.

<ul><li> Analyst QuickTake: Partnering with Sodexo for university rollouts has been a common strategy among players, as the company offers dining services for approximately 850 colleges and universities across North America. Kiwibot has rolled out robots at universities in partnership with Sodexo before, but today’s news marks the first large-scale partnership with the company for future deployments. Kiwibot’s peer company Starship Technologies too has deployed droids at universities in partnership with Sodexo, but does not have such large-scale commitments in the pipeline. However, incumbent Yandex, which develops a similar droid, partnered with Grubhub last July to rollout autonomous deliveries at 250 GrubHub partnering campuses across the US—a much larger scale deployment with two launched to date.</ul>