Brad Squicciarini and Zach Rash, co-founders of COCO, met at UCLA where they started the university’s autonomous vehicles research lab. During these years, they spent a lot of time researching the self-driving industry, existing use cases, and opportunities to change existing experiences through robotics. 

Upon graduating, they settled on tackling the concept of the last-mile delivery service. With their own college experiences fresh on their mind, they knew that facilitating quick, cheap deliveries of essential grocery items would pique students’ interest. 

But getting a prototype to market in order to facilitate a delivery was more time-consuming than they expected. Zach recalls, “We needed a way to aggregate all the ROS information from each robot and publish it over the web for easy access to monitor and maintain. Our developers were trying to make something like Freedom Robotics, but it just wasn’t their domain of expertise and it was dramatically slowing us down.” 

“Once we saw a demo of Freedom Robotics, we threw away all the code we wrote. With Freedom’s software and within 48 hours of receiving our hardware, we were up and running with unmanned delivery robots. This is unheard of in our industry. Freedom Robotics accelerated our time-to-market dramatically and allowed us to ship our idea within days,” recalls Zach.