European Uber rival Bolt will deliver food to your door via self-driving robots
Bolt is set to launch food delivery via robot in partnership with the robotics firm Starship Technologies.
Bolt
Estonian ride-hailing firm Bolt says it will begin delivering food to people’s doors from a fleet of self-driving robots through a partnership with robotics firm Starship Technologies.
The company said it would start offering online food deliveries in its home city of Tallinn later this year in an initial rollout of Starship’s robots, which are roughly the size of a suitcase.
“We are focused on providing well-rounded solutions to help make local transportation as sustainable as possible,” Markus Villig, founder and CEO of Bolt, said in a statement Wednesday.
“Starship offers a smart and much-loved service that has proven itself over the past five years and we’re excited to introduce this service to more people.”
Bolt, one of Europe’s most highly valued tech companies with a valuation of $8.4 billion, made a name for itself challenging Uber in the U.S. ride-hailing giant’s key international markets, particularly the U.K.
The company has since expanded into several other lines of business, including online food and grocery delivery and e-scooters.
Founded in 2013 and formerly known as Taxify, Bolt has around 100 million customers in 45 countries across Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America.
Bolt has raised more than $2 billion in funding to date from investors including Sequoia, World Bank unit IFC, and the European Investment Bank.
How it will work
Just like ordering food online from apps in the typical way, Bolt’s Starship partnership will allow users to get their food delivered from robots at the tap of a button.
Once the robot arrives at your door, you’ll be able to press a button that opens it up and receive your meals or groceries.
Wednesday’s news marks a major milestone in reaching commercial deployment of the technology at scale.
Bolt plans to start deliveries in Tallinn in the coming months and then roll the robots out to further markets at a later point in time.
Starship, headquartered in San Francisco and co-founded by some of the founders of Skype, already operates a fleet of autonomous delivery robots in the U.S.
Stateside, the service is primarily used by college students in partnership with the food delivery firm Grubhub.
The firm has a similar deal in place in the U.K. and other European countries with British grocer Co-op.
Starship, which has raised around $200 million in funding to date, is one of many companies testing the use of robotics for delivering food and other goods.
In Asia, Chinese companies have been early to the trend. Meituan, the major food delivery app, was testing its robots in offices and hotels as early as 2019.
Some attempts to make deliveries using fleets of robots have been hit with setbacks, as widespread takeup of the technology has been limited.
In the U.S., for example, Amazon ended its field tests of Scout, a delivery robot that sent small packages to customers’ homes, in a bid to cut down on costs.
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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attends a roundtable discussion at the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris on June 11, 2025.
Sarah Meyssonnier | Reuters
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sold 100,000 shares of the chipmaker’s stock on Friday and Monday, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
The sales are worth nearly $15 million at Tuesday’s opening price.
The transactions are the first sale in Huang’s plan to sell as many as 600,000 shares of Nvidia through the end of 2025. It’s a plan that was announced in March, and it’d be worth $873 million at Tuesday’s opening price.
The Nvidia founder still owns more than 800 million Nvidia shares, according to Monday’s SEC filing. Huang has a net worth of about $126 billion, ranking him 12th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The 62-year-old chief executive sold about $700 million in Nvidia shares last year under a prearranged plan, too.
Nvidia stock is up more than 800% since December 2022 after OpenAI’s ChatGPT was first released to the public. That launch drew attention to Nvidia’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, which were needed to develop and power the artificial intelligence service.
The company’s chips remain in high demand with the majority of the AI chip market, and Nvidia has introduced two subsequent generations of its AI GPU technology.
Nvidia continues to grow. Its stock is up 9% this year, even as the company faces export control issues that could limit foreign markets for its AI chips.
In May, the company reported first-quarter earnings that showed the chipmaker’s revenue growing 69% on an annual basis to $44 billion during the quarter.
Dario Amodei, Anthropic CEO, speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box outside the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 21st, 2025.
Gerry Miller | CNBC
Anthropic‘s use of books to train its artificial intelligence model Claude was “fair use” and “transformative,” a federal judge ruled late on Monday.
Amazon-backed Anthropic’s AI training did not violate the authors’ copyrights since the large language models “have not reproduced to the public a given work’s creative elements, nor even one author’s identifiable expressive style,” wrote U.S. District Judge William Alsup.
“The purpose and character of using copyrighted works to train LLMs to generate new text was quintessentially transformative,” Alsup wrote. “Like any reader aspiring to be a writer.”
The decision was a significant win for AI companies as legal battles play out over the use and application of copyrighted works in developing and training LLMs. Alsup’s ruling begins to establish the legal limits and opportunities for the industry going forward.
A spokesperson for Anthropic said in a statement that the company was “pleased” with the ruling and that the decision was, “Consistent with copyright’s purpose in enabling creativity and fostering scientific progress.”
CNBC has reached out to the plaintiffs for comment.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, was brought by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson in August. The suit alleged that Anthropic built a “multibillion-dollar business by stealing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books.”
Alsup did, however, order a trial on the pirated material that Anthropic put into its central library of content, even though the company did not use it for AI training.
“That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for the theft, but it may affect the extent of statutory damages,” the judge wrote.
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