Self-driving delivery vehicle startup Boxbot raised $7.5 million in seed funding in a round led by Artiman Ventures, with participation from Pear Ventures, Afore Capital, Ironfire Ventures, and The House Fund. The round also included an investment from Toyota AI Ventures, a subsidiary of the Toyota Research Institute that invests in early-stage startups in artificial intelligence, data/cloud, autonomous mobility, and robotics. This is Toyota AI Ventures’ first investment in the self-driving delivery space.
Boxbot—co-founded in 2016 by veteran engineers from Tesla and Uber—is working to address the last-mile problem in logistics through a combination of robotics and autonomous systems. The Boxbot team’s experience includes work for autonomous systems, robotics, and logistics companies Tesla, Uber, Amazon, Getaround, and Northrop Grumman.