Rookie: about 80,000 deliveries in four years at NAVER’s 1784 HQ

An office delivery robot with its brain on the server

Rookie is an indoor delivery robot made by NAVER LABS. When NAVER opened its second headquarters, 1784, in Jeongja-dong, Seongnam, in April 2022, it gave Rookie parcel delivery first and planned to add lunch boxes and café orders. Rookie is about 3 feet tall, and Freethink described it as looking “a bit like a water dispenser, minus the jug.” NAVER calls it a 5G-based “brainless robot”: it runs on cloud, 5G and digital-twin technology. It confirms recipients with face recognition and moves between floors in a robot-only elevator called Roboport.

80,000 deliveries, a two-month break and Rookie 2

By March 2025 Rookie had made 60,000 deliveries. That year it extended delivery to Green Factory, the building next door, which was not built for robots. In August 2026 Edaily reported that staff had used the service about 80,000 times over four years, across lunch boxes, coffee, parcels, convenience-store items and documents. NAVER paused robot delivery at 1784 for two months from July 2026 for a reorganisation, the first pause since the building opened in 2022. NAVER LABS unveiled the second-generation Rookie 2 in November 2025 and planned to roll it out in phases from September 2026. In July 2026 NAVER announced it would supply Rookie and the 1784 solution to Tokyo Midtown Yaesu. Edaily reported that the complex replaced its existing delivery robots, made by another company, entirely with Rookie.

More than swapping one robot for another

The field record is mostly numbers. Dealsite reported that Rookie handles hundreds of tasks a day. A NAVER official said bringing in Rookie 2 was part of preparing for commercial use and meant more than simply replacing robots. This research found no direct comments from employees who use it.

The building was designed along with the robot

Rookie is a service built with its building, not a robot on its own. 1784 has a robot-only elevator, and the robot’s brain sits in the cloud. Yet in 2025 Rookie began delivering to a neighbouring building not designed for robots, and in 2026 it was exported to another company’s building. Rookie 2 moves part of its localisation onto the robot itself.

Does this robot fit the building, or does the building fit the robot?

What we haven’t confirmed

• How many of the robots at 1784 are Rookies (reports give about 100 robots for the building as a whole)
• The exact date Rookie made its first delivery
• How far the switch to Rookie 2 has gone as of October 2026
• The specific reason for the July–August 2026 pause