Coco: a delivery robot that spread to four cities and met pushback on the sidewalk

From a box on wheels to a Segway chassis

Coco is a Los Angeles startup founded in 2020 by Zach Rash and Brad Squicciarini, who met at UCLA. According to The Spoon, the first robots were built in a living room. In December 2021 TechCrunch described Coco’s existing fleet of 100 Coco 0 robots as a box on wheels and reported that Segway would build 1,000 remotely piloted sidewalk robots. The new robots carry cameras and GPS, and one pilot watches several deliveries and takes over at tricky points such as crosswalks. Rash called this a business-first approach. On the look of Coco 2, unveiled in February 2026, the CEO told the Los Angeles Times that the robot was meant to feel warm and friendly to people. It is painted in a pink-and-white gradient, with the company name printed in lowercase.

A claimed 1,000 robots and 500,000 deliveries

In August 2024 Uber Eats began robot delivery with Coco in Los Angeles, and customers could pick a robot as the delivery method. Coco said it had made more than 300,000 deliveries and deployed over 1,000 robots in Finland and Los Angeles. In April 2025 DoorDash started sidewalk robot delivery in the US. The company said it completed more than 100,000 deliveries in the DoorDash pilot alone and more than 500,000 in total. In June it raised $80 million from investors including Sam Altman and said it would deploy thousands of vehicles by the end of 2025. Rash said he expected to reach 10,000 robots by the end of 2026. KTLA, citing a February 2026 Los Angeles Times report, put Coco at roughly 300 robots on Los Angeles streets. We could not confirm whether the two figures count the same thing. Coco 2, unveiled that month, runs without a remote driver and can leave the sidewalk for streets and bike lanes where that is legal. The company said autonomous robots let it reach more neighborhoods at lower cost.

A ban petition and damage in Chicago

In February 2026 on NPR, Fast Company’s Ainsley Harris reported that Chicago residents found sidewalk delivery robots unnerving. A resident who had a bad encounter with a robot while out with his two young children started a petition, and Chicago appeared to be the first city with a petition to ban them. Some residents kicked or tipped over robots. In March, within a week, a Serve Robotics robot and a Coco robot broke glass at Chicago bus shelters. Coco’s head of government relations, Carl Hansen, called it rare and isolated and said it was the first time one of its robots had hit a structure like that. The mayor said the pilot was serving its purpose, and the pilot runs until May 2027. In October the New York Times reported vandalism of robots in Los Angeles, Miami and Philadelphia, and a video of men toppling a robot in Sacramento drew nearly 2.5 million views. Coco’s CEO told the Los Angeles Times that community response has been generally positive. We found no design award or outside expert review of the design.

Growth riding on ordering platforms

Coco’s expansion rested on ordering platforms such as Uber Eats, DoorDash and Wolt and on Segway, which built the vehicle. Rash said every ten Coco robots create one engineering job. Coco 2 moved toward removing the remote driver. The customer who orders a delivery and the pedestrian on the sidewalk are different people. In Chicago the petition and the damage came from the pedestrian side. The pink gradient and lowercase name are described as choices to make the robot look friendly, but we found no material that tested their effect.

How far can a pink finish and a lowercase name reduce the unease of pedestrians who never chose this robot?

What we haven’t confirmed

• How many robots actually operate (the gap between the 1,000-robot statement and the roughly 300 reported in Los Angeles)
• Cost per delivery and whether the service is profitable
• Size, weight and price of Coco 2
• We found no outside design evaluation (awards, expert reviews)