The travel industry is booming. Worldwide, there are nearly 200,000 hotels, and it’s estimated that they count more than 17 million rooms between them. That’s a whole lot of towels to replace each morning, and a startup co-founded by alumnus Sajeel Purewal, 3E8 Robotics, is trying to make housekeeping more efficient.
3E8 Robotics is developing an indoor delivery robot that can navigate the hallways – and the elevators – of large buildings such as hotels, condo towers, and retirement residences. It could one day bring fresh towels directly from the laundry room to housekeeping staff, saving thousands of hours of work.
“When we talked to hotel owners, they told us that replacing bed sheets and towels was one of their biggest time sinks,” Purewal, Com’24, says. “One hotel told us they did about 60 deliveries a day. That is about six hours’ worth of employee time. Do some quick math on the costs, and you end up asking: could a robot do that instead?”
3E8 has built one designed to do exactly that. The company’s autonomous robot, Elly, can deliver packages directly to rooms within a building.
“Elly is a little bit like a miniature autonomous car,” says Purewal. “It moves around on wheels, and has a sensors, cameras, and Light Detection and Ranging, a remote sensing technology that uses lasers to make a three-dimensional map of its environment. It processes this information to be able to navigate a building and make deliveries.”
Purewal launched the company with friends David Feldt, Pranav Seelam, and Ari Wasch in Toronto, before moving to San Francisco to join the Founders Inc. accelerator, where they lived in a hostel for six weeks with 18 other entrepreneurs. While they were there, the company obtained venture capital funding and tested its prototype in high-rise residential buildings.
Now, the company is developing a second, more polished version of Elly, which is set for a 30-day pilot project delivering food orders in a large condo building. Ultimately, the company’s vision is to make a robot that can operate autonomously in any building. This would be a big step up from existing delivery robots, which require elevator retrofits and aren’t easily scalable.
“Currently, a building needs to spend thousands of dollars retrofitting its elevators to even allow for delivery robots to operate,” says Purewal.
But Elly overcomes this challenge by using computer vision to identify the button, and a robotic arm to physically push it. And eventually, Elly could deliver a lot more than just towels or food orders. One day, 3E8 hopes to integrate a robotic arm that can pick and place delivery items like Amazon packages. But for now, the company’s focus is firmly on creating a technology that can make hotels more efficient and condo life a little easier.
“I really wanted to work on something that would have an impact, and it happened to be robotics,” says Feldt, who co-founded 3E8 with Purewal, Seelam, and Wasch shortly after graduating from the University of Waterloo. “And when you see people's reactions to Elly, you understand how it could actually help their day-to-day.”
