Platform partnerships and direct merchant margins
Coco Robotics
Coco is building two businesses at once, a network supplier to DoorDash and Uber, and a software and fleet partner to large merchants, and that mix matters because the first side fills robots with order volume while the second side captures more of the economics. Platform integrations put Coco in front of hundreds of stores quickly, while dedicated fleets let restaurant chains brand the robots, control dispatch, and replace paid driver shifts with a subscription style service.
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The platform side is the scaling engine. DoorDash expanded Coco from a Helsinki pilot into Los Angeles and Chicago in April 2025, with nearly 600 participating merchants, then into Miami and DashMart grocery and retail deliveries in November 2025. That gives Coco dense order flow without having to sign each store one by one.
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The direct merchant side is the margin engine. Enterprise restaurants that have enough order density can keep robots dedicated to their stores, put their own branding on them, and run a robot fleet as a cheaper version of in house delivery. That is a more valuable product than being just another delivery node inside a marketplace.
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This mirrors the broader robot delivery market, but Coco is pushing it deeper into urban logistics. Starship also mixes platform and direct relationships, but is strongest on campuses and sidewalks. Coco is optimized more like a bike courier, using roads, bike lanes, and sidewalks, which makes direct merchant fleets more useful in dense city neighborhoods.
Over time, the winning robot networks are likely to look like cloud infrastructure for local delivery. Platform partnerships will keep volume high and training data flowing, while direct merchant contracts will become the profit pool and the switching cost. The more Coco proves it can run branded fleets reliably in dense cities, the less it looks like a vendor and the more it looks like core logistics infrastructure.