In 2022 we were hired to sell a delivery robot in a country with no rules for delivery robots.
Every conversation about autonomous delivery in this region runs into the same wall in the first ten minutes. The technology works. The economics are arguable. The question nobody in the room can answer is who gives permission for the machine to move.
That single fact reorganised the whole target list. A pavement robot cannot operate on public roads here, so the buyer is not really the restaurant chain or the pharmacy. It is whoever owns the ground: a master community, a mall, a business park, a golf course, a university campus. We stopped selling deliveries and started selling to landlords.
What we did
Thirteen months across the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. 113 meetings booked, 83 confirmed held, 102 companies met the rover.
Delivery and quick commerce: Careem, Talabat, Deliveroo, InstaShop, Hungerstation, Jahez, ToYou, Nana. Logistics and post: Aramex, DHL, FedEx, UPS, Emirates Post, Saudi Post, SMSA, Naqel, CEVA. Food and retail operators: McDonald's, Domino's through Alamar, Papa John's, AlBaik, Kudu, Starbucks through Alshaya, Panda, BinDawood, Spinneys, Choithrams, Life Pharmacy. And the property side that turned out to matter most: Emaar, Sobha, Nshama Town Square, Remraam, Dubai Internet City, Dubai Golf, Abu Dhabi Golf, Sharjah Golf and Shooting Club.
The meeting where the robot turns up
A third of these meetings were demonstrations, and the demonstration was the sale.
The reference run went from a Life Pharmacy on 92 Street to an address sixty metres up the same road. The prospect placed the order themselves through the client's interface, watched the rover come to the pharmacy door, closed the hatch, followed it on a map link sent to their own phone, and opened it at the other end with a button. Nine minutes, no slide.
Nothing else we could have said would have done that job. A rover is a machine that sounds like a gimmick in an email and stops sounding like one the moment somebody watches it wait at a kerb.
The other lesson of that year was the approval question, which we learned to raise in the first meeting rather than the fourth. Ahead of a mall meeting our rep put it to the client plainly: are we asking this mall for permission to run the rover, for permission for the delivery operator, or for both. Get that wrong and you spend a month with the wrong signature on the wrong desk.
Avride has since become part of the Nebius group, and in 2025 Uber and Nebius announced an investment of up to 375 million dollars in the business.
What it shows
For a genuinely new category, the qualifying question is not who wants this. It is who is allowed to say yes. Map the permission chain before the target list, and build the demo into the first meeting rather than the third, because a machine demonstrates itself better than any deck describes it.