UK Online Grocer Ocado Teams with Oxbotica to Develop Autonomous Driving Systems for Delivery Operations

Sieeka Khan, Tech Times 16 April 2021, 09:04 am

Ocado, the UK online grocer is now making an investment to help their business grow and create a technology for its online order-and-delivery services.

The company is taking a $13.8 million (£10 million) stake in Oxbotica, a UK startup that develops autonomous driving systems.

Ocado and Oxbotica teams up

Ocado is treating this as a strategic investment to create AI-powered, self-driving systems that will work across its operations, from cars within and around its packing warehouses through to the last-mile cars that deliver grocery orders to people's homes.

The online grocer stated it expects the first products to come out of this deal to be online within two years, most likely in closed environments like warehouses instead of less structured prospect of open streets, as per CNN.

Also Read: Google, Walmart Team Up To Let Users Buy Groceries With Google Assistant

Alex Harvey, chief of advanced technology at Ocado, said that they are not constraining themselves to work in any one use case but to roll out autonomous systems everywhere, they realized that there are areas where they will need regulatory compliance, among other factors.

According to Reuters, the deal is non-exclusive, and both can work with other partners if they choose, the companies confirmed.

The news about this deal came just a day after Walmart in the United States took a stake in Cruise, another autonomous tech company, as part of the company's $2.75 billion monster round, as per TechCrunch.

Until February, Walmart owned one of Ocado's big competitors in the United Kingdom, and Ocado has made its first forays into the US, by way of its deal to power Kroger's online grocery business, which went live this week. This means that the competition between the two companies is heating up.

More generally, there has been a massive surge in the world of online grocery order and delivery services in 2020.

Earlier movers like online-only Ocado, Tesco in the UK, and Instacart in the US have seen record demand, but they have also been joined by a lot of competition from well-capitalized newer companies who are also keen to seize that chance, and bringing different approaches to do so.

In Europe, other big names looking to extend outside of their home turfs include Oda, Rohlik in Czech Republic, Everli in Italy, and Picnic in Netherlands.

Ocado has raised massive amounts of money to pursue its own international plans. A lot of these companies will have had a massive year in 2020, not only because of the pandemic but how it drove a lot of people to stay at home, and stay away from places where they might get the virus.

Ocado's next move

The big question now is how will the market look in the future as people's lives go back to normal? Ocado has already laid out how the demand is lower, although still higher than pre-pandemic times.

The new normal may well see the competitive landscape tighten some more. That could be the reason why companies like Ocado are putting more investments into what could be the next generation of services, services that are more efficient and run purely on technology.