Merchant Hosted Robot Fleets

This setup turns fleet storage from a fixed cost center into merchant supplied infrastructure. Scooter networks had to pay people to hunt down vehicles, charge them, and redeploy them every night. Coco keeps robots on merchant property, where they start the day next to demand, stay under supervision, and avoid the vandalism and battery churn that made shared scooters burn cash.

• Coco describes a tight chain of custody. Robots are parked at merchant sites or local pods overnight, sit on merchant property between trips, and return after deliveries, which sharply reduces theft and wear compared with scooters left loose on sidewalks.
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• The labor model is also different. Scooter sharing needed nightly collection and redeployment crews because vehicles ended up scattered. Coco’s robots reposition themselves between orders and begin near restaurants, so maintenance is mostly charging, cleaning, and swapping worn parts.
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• This is a real competitive edge in urban delivery. Coco says its robots get more than an order of magnitude higher utilization than micro mobility devices, and rivals like Starship and Nuro show the tradeoff, campus robots can be easier to run, while larger road vehicles carry higher hardware and upkeep costs.
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As robot fleets scale, the winners are likely to be the operators that embed themselves into merchant workflows instead of building citywide charging depots. That pushes delivery robotics toward a denser, lower capex model, where owning the software and merchant relationships matters more than owning lots of standalone infrastructure.