This morning, Alastair sent this to Starship staff following an all-hands global meeting
Today is an incredibly difficult day for Starship Technologies and everyone who cares so passionately about the company and our hugely talented team.
Delivering news of this nature is never easy, particularly when it concerns such hard working, professional and dedicated team members. But sadly we have had to make the very tough decision to reduce our team size and close a small number of sites in the US and Germany.
Why we have made this decision
The significant downward shift in the global economy and capital markets’ changing their investment strategies has meant we have needed to make changes and increase our focus on costs and profitability improvements which will allow us to safeguard Starship’s long term future.
We are taking four main steps, which include:
- Staff reductions: we are reducing our global team by 11%. This includes employees in the US and Europe.
- Reduction in service areas: Starship will be ceasing service at a small number sites in the US and Germany. We will be stopping service in these areas over the next two months. We remain committed to all of the other locations we currently serve both in the US and globally.
- Reducing our monthly capital expenditures
- Examining all other expense items across the company for optimization
We have chosen to close the locations that do not have a near-term roadmap to profitability as we have learned some locations are not consistent with our cost improvement objectives. This is down to a combination of factors that impact our commercial results, like the number of merchants that participate, and the number of potential customers in a service area. We want to thank our partners and customers in these areas for welcoming and embracing Starship. We are hopeful that at some point we will be able to serve these markets again but we must say farewell for now.
How Starship moves forward
While it is never easy to share such difficult news, Starship will be better positioned for success in the future, allowing us to continue to extend our position as the autonomous last mile delivery platform of choice. Starship is the only commercial autonomous delivery service currently operating at scale. Our robots are completing more than 2x the deliveries we did last year, highlighting our extraordinary growth and Starship’s ability to solve the many problems that human-based delivery businesses are facing. Each and every member of our team, past and present, has made a contribution to this success and I am so incredibly proud of what we’ve achieved to date. To ensure we secure the long term success of Starship, we will be taking the following steps moving forward:
- Focusing on commercial opportunities where we have been and will be the most successful. When we have the right mix of merchants, consumer base and commercial terms, our service excels and expands. We will redouble our efforts towards these markets.
- Adding new partners as part of our ‘Delivery as a Service’ model, where we provide the power of Starship’s automated delivery platform to meet the needs of retailers, delivery platforms and others which are searching for an environmentally, socially and financially sustainable way to meet the growing demand for local delivery in their businesses.
- We will operate with a more efficient business and operations team across all regions and as we scale to more cities and campuses.
To our team members who are leaving Starship, we want you to know that this is absolutely not a reflection of your performance or your value to us. You have all helped us enormously with our mission to make on-demand delivery more accessible, affordable and sustainable, and you have paved the way to build something that has impacted so many people globally. I want to express our sincere and heartfelt gratitude for your support and thank each and every one of you for your contributions on our journey so far. We will do everything in our power to help find new roles and support you during this transitional period.
Alastair