DoorDash's VP of Autonomy Talks Dot Delivery Bot
Dash Forward 2025, Telo Trucks raises $20M, Walmart moves drugs, Uber Eats adds Aldi
Apologies that your Modern Delivery is a day later than expected; DoorDash flew us up to SF for a day full of huge announcements, including an unexpected new robot they’ve been designing in-house. We’ve got all the details, plus an interview with Ashu Rege, DoorDash’s Vice President of Autonomy, below. Meanwhile, a promising startup has raised $20M for tiny trucks, Walmart’s getting big into drugs and Uber is hungry for groceries…
Today:
Dash Forward 2025: DoorDash Remixes Fulfillment, Reservations & Robotics
Telo Raises $20M for Tiny Trucking
Chart Time | Walmart’s Big Drug Push
Uber Eats, DD Add Grocers Galore
3PD | Announcements Aplenty from Dash Forward 2025
DoorDash unveiled a slew of new features and updates at Dash Forward 2025, with the platform set to rethink everything from fulfillment, to discovery / reservations, autonomy / robotics, order accuracy, creator content, the courier experience and more.
Kicking off the day, DoorDash launched “Going Out,” its push into reservations and in-store rewards. A new tab in-app allows users to discover local restaurants, while receiving an average of $9 in value per order. And tapping into its recent acquisition of SevenRooms, DoorDash now offers reservations, starting in Miami and NYC, with the tantalizing offer of no cover fees to restaurateurs for rezzies made through the app.
Adding to the discovery process, DoorDash is also adding in new creator-produced videos to restaurant profiles, plus an integration with Yelp. And because its 2025, new AI tools mean the app will hopefully get better at recommending both merchants and specific items.
On the fulfillment front, the launch of DashMart Fulfillment Services means retailers can rely on DD for end-to-end logistics and delivery, including inventory management, picking, packing, and delivery by Dashers. Launch partners include CVS Pharmacy and Party City. Given that Party City recently went bankrupt and is down to just 26 franchised stores, this could be an interesting way for legacy brands to reclaim nationwide scale without significant CapEx.
DoorDash also redesigned the Dasher experience, with a new app for its couriers featuring a streamlined home-screen, a real-time earnings tracker, insights into offer wait times, an improved side menu, quick scheduling and a fully redeveloped first-party map, designed to solve the final-foot problem.
DoorDash has also been quietly working on a number of hardware innovations. First out the gate was the SmartScale, meant to improve order accuracy by letting merchants weigh items before they go out the door, ensuring they include all the expected elements. Launch partner Panera Bread has already seen a 42% reduction in guest-reported missing items.
DoorDash Co-Founder and Head of DoorDash Labs Stanley Tang also announced the launch of an Autonomous Delivery Platform, building off concepts first teased at Curbivore 2025. While that included software updates to better work with partners like Coco and Wing, DoorDash surprised the audience by announcing they’d been developing their own in-house delivery robot: Dot.
Dot is 10% the size of a car: 58.3” tall, 29” wide, and 49.6” long. It can navigate via sidewalks, as well as on city streets and bike lanes, topping out at 20 miles per hour. And it can carry up to 30 pounds — or six large pizzas — under its roly-poly-like shell. DoorDash has been testing Dot on the wide streets of Greater Phoenix; Jonah Bliss caught up with Ashu Rege, DoorDash’s VP of Autonomy, to learn more.
Jonah Bliss: Starting with the big picture: when did DoorDash decide that it needed to start its own autonomy tech stack, and what drove that decision? Perhaps the most eye-catching part of Dash Forward’s announcements is Dot - your new delivery robot. It’s got a bit of a different design than other bots - taller, rounder, faster - what spurred those decisions?
Ashu Rege: We’ve been working on autonomy for over 7 years and in that time — and over the 10+ billion deliveries DoorDash has facilitated — we’ve acquired a deep understanding of what works, what breaks and what scales in autonomous delivery.
Dot plugs a massive gap in autonomous delivery options we saw on the market. On the one hand you have sidewalk robots that are great for short trips in close-knit neighborhoods in dense urban environments, and you have robotaxis that are well suited to moving people and can travel fast, but that take up a lot of space and often can’t meet the merchant right outside their restaurant. Merchant drop-off is particularly important: busy merchants often don’t have time to load up a car that’s parked half a block away.
In contrast, Dot is the goldilocks robot for our use case: small enough to travel in bike lanes, on sidewalks and up driveways to get right to the merchants’ and customers’ doors; fast enough to get orders to you quickly (it can travel up to 20mph in bike lanes and on roads); tall enough to be highly visible to other road users; big enough to fit many of the kinds of common orders facilitated by the DoorDash platform every day; and with a tech stack advanced enough to operate fully autonomously, with no human intervention (critical for scalability).
Critical too was a friendly, approachable design: we want Dot to integrate seamlessly into the neighborhoods in which it operates, and the reaction we’ve seen from consumers and locals has been overwhelmingly enthusiastic. The robot is all-electric, and its small profile helps reduce congestion. Most importantly, safety is critical to the design: its hardware has a complete 360-degree view of its surroundings across camera, radar and lidar sensors; and its software has both deep learning algorithms and geometric search to ensure it can navigate from A to B intelligently while always having a fallback.
What can you tell us about the hardware and software technology that underpins Dot?
Dot has a camera-primary hardware stack: 8 external cameras ensure a full 360-degree view of its surroundings. These are supported by 4 radar units for depth perception and other perceptual signals, and 3 lidar units that complement the other sensor modalities. We are already working on the next generation of the robot that reduces the number of lidar sensors to 1 to help ensure scalability.
The software stacks help Dot perceive the world around it, predict the behavior of other road users, and plan and execute on the next move in its driving. These systems are underpinned both by machine learning (which is effective at learning nuanced driving patterns in the geographies in which we operate, and includes both behavior cloning and reinforcement learning algorithms) and geometric search, which provides a failsafe to ensure the robot knows exactly where it is at all times.
We believe our technical stack is already one of the world’s most advanced fully autonomous systems in the world today, and we’ve designed it with rapid scalability in mind.
When delivery robots were first emerging, we saw a few others try the on-road approach: Refraction AI, Tortoise, more recently Vayu Robotics. Many struggled with market traction; what’s different about your approach? What separates DoorDash’s approach to autonomy from others in the sector?
The form factor is of course a major advantage: Dot is the world’s first local delivery robot built to operate in bike lanes, neighborhood streets and on sidewalks. This flexibility is critical to ensuring the design can handle the types of orders that DoorDash helps fulfill on a daily basis.
But there are a couple of other really critical differences besides the robot itself:
First is our data. DoorDash has already fulfilled over 10 billion orders: we have ground truth data points on exactly what works, what breaks and what scales in local delivery. We aren’t just training Dot on the kinds of data that autonomous vehicle companies have, operating on surface streets, but on the kinds of data about what makes for a perfect merchant handoff or a perfect customer drop-off.
Where other autonomy companies have had to build their own customer experiences and user bases from scratch, or partner with a third party, Dot already has a massive market to scale: DoorDash itself. It seamlessly integrates into all the infrastructure we’ve built to operate our platform to date: our operations, our logistics, our customer support. That opens a ready pathway to scale.
Finally, the Autonomous Delivery Platform (ADP) helps integrate end-to-end AI for commerce, not just the driving task. Dot complements new innovations like our Smart Scale, which help merchants ensure they’re handing off the right packages for the right orders. And the ADP helps ensure we’re matching the right order to the right delivery method, whether it’s assigning a small coffee order to a drone, a big food order to Dot, or a complex grocery order to a dasher.
The attached blog includes a bit more information about what makes our approach to autonomy different.
DoorDash already works with a wide array of autonomy partners, including Wing and Coco Robotics - how does the company navigate that those startups might think of Dot as directly competing with them for select delivery orders?
Third-party partnerships remain a key part of our strategy.
There is no one-size-fits-all delivery method for everything now available on DoorDash. Order volumes are growing at around ~20% year over year, and the range of products available for delivery on DoorDash is growing in parallel as we make ecommerce even easier. Today’s announcement about DoorDash merchant fulfillment is a good example: merchants without any physical storefronts can now sell to local consumers via DoorDash, fulfilled by DoorDash.
The vision for delivery is multimodal, with all these delivery types operating — and growing — in parallel: sidewalk robots helping serve local trips in dense cities; Dot for bigger orders in suburban markets where consumers live further away from merchants; dashers for complex restaurant, retail or grocery trips (e.g. multistop, or in apartment buildings); and drones for small, fast orders like the morning coffee.
The key announcement today was the Autonomous Delivery Platform, which is the infrastructure layer we’re building to orchestrate orders delivered by first-party autonomy (Dot), third-party autonomy and other delivery methods (drones, sidewalk robots) and of course Dashers. That helps ensure that each delivery method has a ready pathway to scale.
Can you speak a bit about the software and merchant integrations that power the hand-off between restaurant or retailer and robot? How do you decide which orders go to a robot versus a drone, and can merchants be serviced by multiple providers or modalities?
Our Autonomous Delivery Platform is built on top of one of the world’s largest delivery networks, drawing on the billions of data points we have about effective merchant pickups and consumer drop-offs all in the last 10 feet, and billions of ground-truth commercial outcomes.
At a high level, Dot makes the most sense for bigger orders in suburban markets where consumers live further away from merchants; Dashers remain incredibly important for complex restaurant, retail or grocery trips (e.g. multistop, or in apartment buildings); and drones help facilitate small, fast orders like the morning coffee or breakfast burrito.
We believe the future of delivery is multi-modal and absolutely have plans to work with merchants across those different modalities. The ability to adjust and create designated pickup locations and repeatable, simple loading processes make operations easier for merchant partners, regardless of their size.
EVENTS | Urban Autonomy Summit — Oct. 8 in Brooklyn, NY
Curbivore is pleased to invite you to the Urban Autonomy Summit, presented by Nexar, convening at Newlab Brooklyn on October 8th, 2025.
New York City is at an inflection point: autonomous vehicles are no longer a future debate—they’re already navigating big-city streets. With the likes of Waymo, Tesla, Zoox, Wayve and more all testing in dense urban cores, NYC and other megalopolises face urgent questions around safety, equity, and integration with existing urban transport systems. Now is the moment for a critical discussion to shape AV deployments.
STARTUPS | Telo Raises $20M for Tiny Electric Trucks
Telo Trucks — the San Carlos, CA-based maker of an urban-scaled electric pickup truck — just closed on $20 million in Series A financing. The funding round was led by Tesla co-founder Marc Tarpenning and famed designer Yves Behar, with additional investment came from TO VC, E12 Ventures, Neo, Marc Benioff, Uncorrelated Ventures, Nova Threshold, MCJ, and others. Telo now has over 12,000 pre-orders of its MT1 truck, which seats five and has the same bed length of a Toyota Tacoma, despite measuring in at just 152 inches long.
The Big Picture: In an era where both trucks and EVs seem to be getting bigger and bigger, Telo’s approach is a welcome change: the MT1 is 5 feet shorter than most mid-size pickups, while still packing an impressive 350 mile range. While Modern Delivery feels that bikes and bots are the best size for dense cities, this economical pickup is certainly a better delivery vehicle for the suburbs than the lumbering mega-pickups that maraude American streets. It’s also a noble attempt to show that America can manufacture a petite EV of any type; which is all the more important now that China is also mastering production of electric heavy-duty vehicles.
CHART TIME | Walmart’s Pharma Delivery Boom
Walmart’s pharmaceutical business is booming: at $32.7B it’s now the country’s fifth biggest prescriber. Now the Bentonville Big Boxer is stepping on the gas — announcing same-day delivery of refrigerated and reconstituted medications, like the ultra-popular Ozempic. Although it’s TBD if Trump’s new tariff on pharmaceuticals will help or hinder this expansion…
GROCERY | Uber, DoorDash Add New Supermarkets
Uber is beefing up its grocery game, adding the nationwide grocery brand Aldi to its platform. With 2,500+ stores, Aldi is the first retailer on Uber Eats to accept SNAP-EBT payments nationwide upon launch. UE is also adding on a number of regional grocers: Citarella, in NYC and the Hamptons; Rouses Market, in the Gulf Coast; Town & Country Supermarkets, in Missouri / Arkansas; Wild Fork, with locations across Florida, Texas, Illinois, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, California and Wisconsin; and Rosauers Supermarkets, with stores in Washington, Idaho, Montana and Oregon. Uber now expects non-restaurant deliveries to hit an annual run rate of $12.5 billion in gross bookings by the end of the year; that’s up 25% from the $10 billion run rate it projected back in May.
The Big Picture: The competition is not resting on its laurels. DoorDash has a big new grocery partner of its own, announcing an expansion of its earlier limited-partnership with Kroger. This deal covers nearly 2,700 stores, across Kroger’s family of brands that includes Ralphs, Mariano’s, Fred Meyer, Harris Teeter and more. And for grocers that don’t want to be tied so closely to a big 3PD, Nash just launched Pick & Deliver, allowing grocery stores and other retailers to use delivery service providers to pick items from store shelves and deliver them to customers while maintaining control of customer relationships and product data. New Gridwise data shows that for the time being, DoorDash maintains an edge in the retail delivery space.
A Few Good Links
Instacart adds new features, including SNAP EBT tracking, to Caper Carts. Doorstep raises $8M to solve final-foot problem in delivery. FTC wins $2.5B suit against Amazon. Enakl raises $1.4M for delivery in Africa. ICE agents have nothing better to do than chase after Chicago delivery worker exercising his first amendment rights. Instacart and Advantage partner on shelf visibility. Grubhub combats food insecurity. Jimmy John’s moves to points based rewards. Wendy’s adds VP of International Technology. BK targets families. McDonald’s adds new bevvies; so does Taco Bell. Starbucks has a “Sharpie problem.” KiwiCo turns to Amazon fulfillment; so does BarkBox. Costco sales up 8%. 35% of U.S. families with children have skipped a meal in the past month because of financial reasons. Albertsons expands retail media network. Amazon to shutter all Amazon Fresh markets in U.K. 18% of SMBs don’t think they’re likely to survive. Fatburger heads to Japan. Starbucks CTO stepping down. Deliveroo adds wine retailer Laithwaites. Delivery Hero adds Supervisory Board member. Meet Cargo Cycling’s Doer cargo e-bike. DOT pressures states over noncitizen CDLs. Bolt tracks the impact of shared mobility.
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