Last-mile robotics startup Neubility -- which makes autonomous delivery robots that work without lidar -- says that it plans bump its fleet up to 400  by the end of this year, up from the 50 it currently has in circulation. The goal is part of an ambitious plan that the Seoul-based startup has laid out to boost its business after pivoting no less than five times since it was founded six years ago, but also most recently closing out a Series A of $26 million. The plans also include launching a new security robot alongside its models dedicated to delivery.

Fittingly for a startup now focused on mobility, Neubility has come a long way from its original product, a haptic glove device for video games. CEO of Neubility Sangmin Lee told TechCrunch that it's been focused on developing hardware and software for its latest effort, delivery robots, since late 2019.  

Neubility operates in a crowded industry that includes peers like Starship Technologies, Coco, Cartken and Kiwibot in the self-driving delivery robot space and Knightscope, which develops security robots. Lee told me that the startup's differentiator is building its in-house developed products, which lead to cost-effective and low maintenance, from robot hardware and software platforms to core technologies such as visual simultaneous localization and mapping (V-SLAM) and sensor fusion. 

"Many [autonomous robots companies] don't develop their own hardware, but the essence of self-driving is having proprietary over the hardware," Lee said. 

And instead of using pricey lidar, Neubie uses V-SLAM, which allows autonomous mobile robots to perceive their surrounding environment and get visual data from the physical world; then, it builds a 3D map generated by the robots and localizes the robots in that map.

Neubility revealed the second version of its autonomous delivery robot, known as Neubie 1.5R, earlier this year at CES 2023. It claims it has the manufacturing scale to produce more than 100 delivery robots of Newbie 1.5R per month. Alongside the robot, it also offers an API Kit for robot monitoring and control solutions called 'Neubie-GO,' which it sells on a "RaaS" (Robotics as a Service) model.