The NoTip pilot food delivery service features Noah the the robot and a driver and the second phase the car will be an autonomous vehicle
Home food delivery services are more common than ever. People love the convenience of ordering food from restaurants and having it delivered to their homes. That is why food delivery is projected to become a $500 billion industry by the year 2030 and NoTipNoTip based in Mason, Ohio is eager to automate the process making it cleaner, safer, faster and smarter.
The current home food delivery business model is expensive for both businesses and consumers. Keeping gig workers on the road can also be a challenge, particularly in a job where safety is a serious concern. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly 20% of all work-related fatalities occur among delivery drivers.
What if there was a way to eliminate the need for human gig drivers in the food delivery business? That is exactly what NoTip intends on changing.
Entrepreneur Automates the $500 Billion Food Delivery Industry
Stephen S. Burns is a serial entrepreneur and technology executive who is now taking on the $500 billion food delivery industry by automating it with a robot and vehicle. He has more than three decades of experience building disruptive companies across automotive, electric vehicles, transportation, telecommunications, and software. These companies have generated billions of dollars in combined revenue.
His latest entrepreneurial endeavor is as the founder and chairman of NoTip, a last-mile autonomous food delivery service. NoTip is a next-generation food delivery platform that merges autonomous car and robot technologies to enable driverless food deliveries to people’s homes. Rather than relying exclusively on unreliable human drivers, the autonomous food delivery robot Noah is the one who will make the deliveries without any human passengers or drivers.
“Every transformative industry eventually reaches a point where software alone isn’t enough; you have to reinvent the underlying infrastructure,” said Steve Burns, Founder & Executive Chairman, NoTip. “Food delivery is at that point today. We built NoTip because restaurants deserve a better business model, consumers deserve a more transparent experience, and autonomous technology has finally matured enough to make both possible.”
The service charges a flat fee of $6 to consumers and zero commission for restaurants. It will save the customers money because they will no longer be expected to tip drivers, and it will save restaurants money because they don’t have to pay drivers any commissions. More people are likely to request food deliveries if they can get it cheaper in this way.
Noah delivers food directly to your door step more efficiently than a human
Burns is on a mission to build the autonomous infrastructure needed to power the next generation of food delivery and local commerce. NoTip has already rolled out the beta version of the autonomous delivery robot Notah in Mason, Ohio, which is near the company’s headquarters. The company is waiting to see how successful the autonomous deliveries are before expanding.
Autonomous vehicles and robots can operate for long periods without the same labor constraints associated with traditional human-based food delivery services. If these automation technologies can successfully navigate their local streets, transport food orders, and complete deliveries, they could ultimately make local food delivery more popular and scalable.
Burns’ long-term plan for his NoTip company is to extend the service beyond restaurant meals to grocery stores, convenience stores, pharmacies, and other local commerce transactions. That would position NoTip at the forefront of a market poised to undergo a significant transformation over the next decade.
“I believe the future of local commerce won’t be powered by gig workers or incremental improvements—it will be powered by intelligent systems that move goods more safely, more efficiently, and at dramatically lower cost,” said Burns.
About Visionary Stephen S. Burns
Stephen S. Burns has founded many groundbreaking companies throughout his more than three decades of entrepreneurial experience. One of his biggest accomplishments was as the founder of Lordstown Motors, where he served as Chairman and CEO while leading the acquisition and transformation of the former General Motors Lordstown Assembly Plant into an electric vehicle manufacturing facility.
He previously founded Workhorse Group, an early pioneer in commercial electric vehicle manufacturing. And even earlier in his career before working in electric mobility, Burns founded Mobile Voice Control, a pioneering speech recognition software company for smartphones that was eventually sold to Nuance Communications for an undisclosed amount.
Burns has a successful track record of starting, scaling, and selling multiple technology ventures and commercializing innovative products that have advanced mobile communications, enterprise software, and transportation technologies. He has become widely recognized for identifying emerging technologies before anyone else and transforming them into industry-leading businesses.
At NoTip, Burns is once again commercializing a new approach to an old problem by assembling a world-class leadership team with experience in autonomous, robotics, electric vehicles, energy, defense, and service industries hailing from Tesla, Lordstown Motors, MiaSolé, Honeywell Defense & Space Electronics, and Cypress Semiconductor. Together, Burns and his team are going to change the world.
Transforming the Industry
Restaurants already operate on tight profit margins. Since restaurants face significant costs working with third-party food delivery platforms, they will be very eager to find a way to reduce those costs while still offering food delivery services to their customers.
The NoTip business model is designed to create a different relationship between restaurants, their customers, and the entire food delivery infrastructure. Instead of restaurants losing money by paying out commissions to drivers, they get to make the same profit from the orders as they would if the customers came to their restaurants in person. Besides, customers likely won’t mind paying a $6 flat fee for the delivery if they don’t have to tip anyone.
NoTip is not simply trying to build another food delivery app. It is attempting to change the infrastructure that makes local food delivery possible. If this autonomous technology can spread to the deliveries of other local goods, we may see a future where there are no more human delivery drivers. All we will have are robots in driverless cars coming to our homes and delivering items.
The results from the Mason rollout of Noah the Robot will be a good indicator of whether NoTip’s autonomous delivery model will be applied to local commerce in the near future.
The company’s phase two platform will be fully autonomous featuring a futuristic three wheel vehicle and Noah the robot as the food delivery team.
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Phase II of the NoTip food delivery system features a futuristic EV autonomous car and Noah working in tandem
