Rolling food delivery bots powered by Coco Robotics will now transport everyday essentials and groceries to customers in Los Angeles, Chicago and Miami, the company announced Thursday.
The bots are already a common sight in L.A., where they have been delivering hot meals from restaurants since April through a partnership with DoorDash. The pink and orange machines, about the size of a large cooler, roam sidewalks from Santa Monica to Silver Lake.
The company’s latest expansion is in collaboration with DoorDash’s delivery-only online store, DashMart. Coco robots will fulfill select DashMart orders, which can include fresh groceries, cleaning products and electronics.
The DashMart partnership could drastically expand the role of delivery bots in everyday purchases. Instead of being limited to restaurant deliveries, the bots can now carry goods from Target, Lowe’s and Petco.
“We’ve built this to be the best possible autonomous vehicle for the delivery of goods,” Coco co-founder and Chief Executive Zach Rash said in an interview.
Coco Robotics operates hundreds of robots in Los Angeles and plans to deploy 10,000 more across the country in 2026. The Santa Monica-based company has completed more than 500,000 zero-emission deliveries and its bots have collectively traveled around 1 million miles.
The delivery service got its start as a dorm room project in 2020, when Rash was a student at UCLA. The bots have turned heads as their numbers have increased over the years, inviting both affection and annoyance.
Some Los Angeles residents find the bots cute and endearing. Others have gone out of their way to vandalize the bots or interfere with their travel.
Rash said there is so much demand for delivery services that the company’s bots are not taking jobs from human drivers.
The bots help make deliveries less expensive, he said.
“Getting groceries delivered to you is an amazing convenience for a lot of reasons,” Rash said. “If we can use our technology to make that much more affordable to people, I think volumes will absolutely grow.”
The company couldn’t share specific expansion plans for Los Angeles, but said it expects the number of delivery bots to grow across several markets.
Coco Robotics’ deliveries are available throughout much of the city already, including in Hollywood, Echo Park, Koreatown and downtown.
“We operate in a lot of the core parts of the city, so I think there’s a lot of opportunity to go more broadly across Los Angeles County,” Rash said.
The company makes money through platforms such as Uber Eats for completing orders, direct payments from merchants for deliveries as well as by leasing parts of the fleet to restaurants and advertising services.
Though initially remotely operated by a human, many of Coco Robotics’ bots now operate autonomously with the help of artificial intelligence.
The company faces competition in the race to perfect autonomous deliveries, including from San Francisco Bay Area-based Serve Robotics. Rash said the young company has plenty of room to grow.
“We’ll be opening up a lot of new markets to meet growing demand,” he said. “We’re going to need more robots.”
