IGNACIO TARTAVULL,

CEO of Tiny Mile Delivery Robots for Urban Areas

Toronto and Ottawa residents have likely seen Tiny Mile robots, affectionately known as Geoffrey, in person or on social media. The robots are pink with adorable heart-shaped eyes. They’ve been used to deliver meals, medication, and even an engagement ring.

However, that wasn’t enough to keep the bots on the street, as both Ottawa and Toronto’s councils voted to ban Tiny Mile from operating in those cities due to safety concerns. The ban nearly bankrupted the company.

Now, Tiny Mile operates in Miami, Florida and Charlotte, North Carolina in the United States, and is looking to expand. CEO Ignacio Tartavull believes in the future of the company, thanks in part to changes in attitudes and behaviours around deliveries adopted during the pandemic.

In Canada, there isn’t anywhere with regulations. Ontario was supposed to be the first, but the person in charge of the proposal left, then there were elections, and so on. Also, for big cities like Toronto and Ottawa, it’s proven a lot harder to reach people in leadership, to speak face-to-face, and showcase the robot and its safety features.

What did you make of people’s reactions to Toronto’s and Ottawa’s decision to ban your company from operating?

People's support was heartwarming. It was incredible, the number of votes the petition got. Because the robots are incredibly visible, there were millions of likes on these videos of all these cute pink robots with heart eyes circulating around, and people loved them. Every day, we’d get messages saying nice things about the robots.

So, when people heard the argument that the robots might be unsafe, it was ridiculous to the people who actually saw them. There were people who commuted and worked where we operated, and they saw the robots every day, and they never saw any danger with them. There was a lot of outrage, and there still is.

Unlike Uber for example, the people operating the robots are employees, not gig workers. Why is that important?

Well, I was the first pilot [for the robots], and then the engineers of the companies became pilots, and so on. When you're developing technology, you want to have the people driving in the same room so you can ask them how to improve it. So, it's natural to have most employees working full-time. You want these people to be overqualified so they can provide great feedback.

The truth is, today, delivery costs like $10; that's how much it costs given the 30 per cent commission that you pay with the fees and whatnot. Our goal is to make it 10 cents, to make it 100 times cheaper. We're not there yet, but we've made progress. Today, we can make deliveries that are five to 10 times cheaper. But to get to 10 cents, we’ll need to make things fully autonomous, and that’s going to take a decade. Until then, the great feedback we get from pilots in the office and by asking questions is super helpful. //

by Staff Writer

ByBlacks.com is ranked the #1 Black Canadian online magazine, having won three national press awards and recognition from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. You started the magazine when diversity was not very rife among business organizations. What initiated the idea of an online magazine, targeting the Black community in Canada?

The idea for the site actually started as a business directory. My husband Roger was meeting so many Black business owners who didn’t have a website, so he wanted to offer them all a space to promote their businesses for free or minimal cost. Then, we realized we have to give people a reason to come back to this site. That’s where the business profiles came in, and we quickly expanded to cover all kinds of topics, and it was natural for me to step in as editor-in-chief, given my journalistic background.

It was clear to me that people, myself included, are hungry for content that speaks to them, reflects their lives, and is informative, yet entertaining. Black people, especially right now, are looking to have as much positivity as possible shown about their community. What really