last-mile
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The VC Firm That Measures Its Thesis in 53 Feet
Venture 53 ignores fashionable sectors and backs the software, sensors and services that keep goods moving. Its advantage is less about a secret algorithm than a tightly packed network of people who already know freight.
How a Stanford Class Project Became the Way America Gets Dinner
It started as a phone number taped to a flyer on a Palo Alto campus. A decade later, DoorDash carries more than $100 billion in orders a year and is quietly rebuilding itself into the plumbing for local commerce.
Fulfil
Fulfil (Fulfil Solutions) is a Mountain View robotics company building a fully automated grocery pick-and-pack system. Its ShopBot robots handle every grocery category and temperature state - produce, refrigerated, frozen - with item-level tracking powered by AI, computer vision and sensor fusion. The goal is to make online grocery, a famously unprofitable business, actually pencil out for retailers while cutting food waste. Fulfil emerged from stealth in February 2023 with $60M in Series B funding and powers Save Mart's Lucky Now same-day delivery service.
Cargomatic
Cargomatic is a digital freight marketplace and technology platform that connects shippers with local and regional trucking capacity in real time. Founded in 2013 and headquartered in Long Beach, California, it specializes in drayage and short-haul freight - moving containers off ports and onto roads - alongside intermodal, full-truckload (FTL), less-than-truckload (LTL), and white-glove delivery. By pairing a carrier mobile app with smart routing and bundling software, Cargomatic helps fill empty truck miles, speed cargo off congested docks, and give shippers visibility into shipments that traditionally lived on paper and phone calls.
Veo
Veo is a Santa Monica-based shared micromobility company that designs, manufactures and operates electric scooters, e-bikes and cargo bikes for cities and university campuses across North America. Founded in 2017 by Purdue graduates Candice Xie and Edwin Tan, Veo built the industry's most diverse vehicle fleet through an in-house design team and became the first profitable shared micromobility operator in the U.S. Rather than chasing growth at any cost, Veo bet on deliberate expansion, exclusive city and campus contracts, and durable, purpose-built vehicles - a strategy that delivered unadjusted EBIT profitability in 2024 while many better-funded rivals retreated.
Kiwibot
Kiwibot builds small four-wheeled sidewalk robots that handle last-mile delivery on university campuses and inside cities. Founded in 2017 by three Colombian engineers and incubated at UC Berkeley's SkyDeck, the company now operates more than 1,200 Level 4 autonomous robots across 30-plus campuses, completing hundreds of thousands of deliveries with partners like Sodexo, Shopify, Chick-fil-A and the City of San Jose. In 2025 the parent entity began doing business as Robot.com, broadening from food delivery into advertising, logistics and inspection.