Coco Robotics has appointed London-based mobility startup Tyred to handle the unglamorous daily upkeep of its UK delivery robot fleet: swapping batteries, fixing breakdowns, storing units overnight and keeping them clean between food runs. The partnership, reported November 11 by Zag Daily, covers Coco's current London operation and its planned expansion to Milton Keynes, Leeds, Stockton-on-Tees and Nottingham.
Coco, a California company that says it has built more than 1,000 sidewalk delivery robots and logged over a million miles, entered the UK earlier this year through an exclusive delivery partnership with Deliveroo. Tyred, which previously managed shared e-bike and e-scooter fleets before raising £2.5 million earlier in 2026, will now run the ground-level logistics that keep those robots moving.
Who keeps a delivery robot running?
A sidewalk delivery robot looks autonomous from the outside, but someone still has to physically move it out to its delivery zone each morning, retrieve it at night, swap in a charged battery when it runs low mid-shift, and send a technician when a wheel jams or a sensor gets knocked loose. Tyred's job covers all of it: daily deployment and retrieval, battery swapping and charging infrastructure, repairs, emergency call-outs for stuck or damaged units, overnight storage at local bases, and cleaning, since these robots carry food.
"A robot still needs the same things: a charged battery, a quick fix and someone close by when something goes wrong," said Tyred co-founder and COO Nikita Baranov. That line captures the gap between flashy robot-delivery headlines and the field-services grind that actually keeps a fleet on the road every day.
Why does this matter beyond London?
Delivery robot companies have mostly built their own ground-operations teams city by city, which gets expensive and slow once a company tries to expand into five or six towns at once. Outsourcing that work to a specialist that already understands shared-fleet logistics, Tyred cut its teeth on e-bikes and scooters, where battery swapping and overnight charging are the same core problem, lets Coco move faster into new UK markets without building a local operations team from scratch in each one.
It also signals a maturing market: when a delivery robot operator starts outsourcing fleet maintenance the way ride-share companies outsource vehicle servicing, it suggests the robots themselves are reliable enough that the bottleneck has shifted from the technology to the logistics of supporting it at scale. For Tyred, the deal is a pivot from consumer micromobility into a faster-growing robotics services niche, betting that every delivery robot company expanding into the UK will eventually need the same battery-swap and repair infrastructure it already built for bikes and scooters.
With Deliveroo pushing robot deliveries into new UK towns and competitors like Starship and Serve Robotics expanding their own sidewalk fleets elsewhere, the operations layer behind delivery robots, not just the robots themselves, is becoming its own competitive battleground.