Co-founder & CEO of Starship

Ahti Heinla is the CEO and co-founder of Starship Technologies. He grew up in a family of computer programmers, wrote his first programme at 10, and has spent his career as a serial tech disruptor.

As a founding engineer and Chief Technical Architect Skype’s billion-dollar success, Ahti helped build one of the most transformative communication platforms of the internet era, at a time when the idea of free global calls still seemed implausible. After Skype, he backed emerging companies through Ambient Sound Investments and kept building, driven by a conviction that the most important technological shifts were still ahead.

Starship began with an unlikely starting point: a NASA competition to build a soil sample retrieval robot for Mars. The team didn’t win. But Ahti saw something the judges didn’t need to evaluate: that the underlying technology was ready for Earth, for urban environments. Specifically, for the cost- and carbon-heavy problem of last-mile delivery.

What followed is one of the most significant demonstrations of physical AI in the world today. Starship’s fleet of over 2,700 autonomous robots has completed almost 10 million deliveries. The robots operate across major grocery networks, restaurant delivery, university campuses, and industrial environments, and across 8 countries: the UK, US, Finland, Estonia, Sweden, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, and Germany. These are robots navigating real streets, collectively completing 100,000+ road crossings every day, in real weather, millions of times over.

At a moment when much of AI remains software-native, Ahti represents something rarer: a founder who has taken autonomous intelligence off the screen and into the world and made it reliably work at scale.