2013
Co-founds Lulo with Sergio Pachón — one of the first Colombian apps to accept card payments for delivery. Bootstrapped; reaches Chile.
Felipe Chávez Cortés
Also written Felipe Chavez Cortes · Felipe Cortes · Felipe Chávez · @felipekiwi90
Co-Founder & CEO, Robot.com
Robotics entrepreneur. He has led the company he co-founded at UC Berkeley in 2017 from a single delivery robot on one campus to a fleet of revenue-generating robots, including humanoids, rovers, industrial robots, and quadrupeds. Together, they have completed 4 million real-world tasks across ten countries.
Profiles & links
Bio
Felipe Chávez Cortés is a Colombian robotics entrepreneur and the co-founder and chief executive of Robot.com, which operated as Kiwibot from 2017 until 2025. He holds a business degree from Universidad de los Andes and was named an MIT Technology Review Innovator Under 35 for Latin America in 2018.
His passion for technology began early. At just 13 years old, he became a technical contributor to LatinWoW, one of the first Spanish-language World of Warcraft emulation projects, in the mid-2000s. Before official regional servers existed, he helped manually translate database strings for thousands of Spanish-speaking players and configure parallel server architectures to accommodate a growing user base. Although he ultimately chose to study business, that early experience of scaling infrastructure and solving complex product challenges became a lasting foundation for his career, giving him a deep technical intuition that he brings to the business side of technology.
His first company was Lulo, founded in 2013 with Sergio Pachón while both were still students. Lulo delivered food and groceries to university students and was one of the first Colombian apps to accept credit card payments; it expanded to Chile and was acquired by Merqueo. The work defined what he has built since: “In that company, I realized that the manual work could be very exhausting and it could be very boring.”
He founded Kiwi Campus in 2017 after joining UC Berkeley’s Global Founders programme at SkyDeck, where the University of California became the company’s first institutional investor. The premise was cost: a delivery fee in California could account for a large share of the order total. The first robots went onto the sidewalks of the Berkeley campus, and from the start he treated public acceptance as a design requirement rather than an afterthought, giving them a face and a deliberately cute form: “You create an authentic connection when people feel characters are very cute… The sidewalks are sacred; we need to make sure the robot will interact in the easiest way with citizens.”
Campus delivery was the company’s first robotics business and remains the clearest measure of what he has built. A single Berkeley pilot has grown into a business serving more than 30 university campuses across North America, making Robot.com the No. 1 campus robot delivery company in the world. The Sodexo relationship shows how that growth came together: a single launch at the University of Denver in 2020; Sodexo’s investment in the company’s Series A and commitment to a multi-campus expansion in 2022; and, in August 2026, a seven-year agreement covering Sodexo-operated campuses across North America — the largest single enterprise deployment in the company’s history.
The newest machine is R-noid, the humanoid launched at Automate 2026 — and deliberately not a general-purpose robot. It runs Physical Intelligence’s π0.7 vision-language-action model for manipulation and FieldAI’s foundation models for navigation.
“The mission that we have as a company is to bring automation to the physical world, to free human beings from labor that they don’t want to do and that they can now actually pursue their meaningful life.”
— Business Insider, June 2026
Robot.com — a name for the ambition
In 2025, the company acquired the robot.com domain and rebranded from Kiwibot to Robot.com. The name reflects the scope of the company Felipe is building: delivery robots, humanoids, industrial robots, and quadrupeds, all working toward the same goal — bringing useful automation into everyday life.
Owning the category’s defining word gives that ambition a clear home. It is a name customers can remember, one that travels across languages, industries, and generations of hardware. For Felipe, the promise behind Robot.com is bigger than any single machine: robots that do real work, create economic value, and give people their time back.
REMI — the intelligence behind the work
REMI is Robot.com’s orchestration platform, connecting robots and AI models to real-world work. Its evolving architecture brings together customer workflow analysis, task-specific training, robot and model evaluation, fleet operations, and human supervision. Deployment data and operator corrections feed back into training and evaluation, helping each validated system improve over time.
Solarpunk / Why robotics
Felipe builds robots because he believes progress should make everyday life more affordable and give people their time back. By taking on repetitive physical work — growing food, moving goods, and keeping daily operations running — robotics can help lower the cost of goods and services. The goal is for those gains to reach people as lower prices and more time to learn, create, rest, and be with the people they love.
As populations age, he sees robotics helping older adults remain independent and easing the physical demands on families and caregivers. Further ahead, he hopes robots can also make parenthood easier: helping with household chores and everyday logistics so parents have more time and energy for their children. It is a vision of technology that supports human care and makes room for more of it.
That outlook is rooted in solarpunk: an optimistic vision of a future in which technology, clean energy, and nature belong together. For Felipe, useful robots are part of that future — working in the background of greener communities while people have more freedom to decide how to spend their lives. The ambition is practical: affordable essentials, support across generations, and a life with more time to be human.
Personal life
Felipe is married to Laura Muriel. They celebrated their civil wedding in Cartagena, Colombia.
Milestones
2015
Lulo is acquired by Merqueo. He is still an undergraduate.
2017
Arrives at UC Berkeley’s Global Founders programme at SkyDeck and founds Kiwi Campus. First delivery robots roll on the Berkeley campus; the University of California becomes his first institutional investor.
2018
Named an MIT Technology Review Innovator Under 35, Latin America. 10,000th meal delivered.
2020
Pivots to B2B and launches in San José. First Sodexo campus goes live at the University of Denver.
2021
Robot 4.0 with Segway manufacturing. Sodexo expansion to New Mexico State, Loyola Marymount and Gonzaga. International debut in Dubai with Careem and the RTA.
2022
Sodexo invests alongside Headline, SolGlobal and the Berkeley SkyDeck Fund — and a multi-campus expansion commitment across the US.
2022
Grubhub partnership brings robot delivery to its campus network, launching at the University of North Dakota.
2024
Acquires Nickelytics, opening the advertising business.
2025
Buys the robot.com domain and rebrands in May; formally launches Robot.com in October at 1.7 million completed tasks. Expands to Saudi Arabia and Canada.
2026
Launches the R-noid wheeled humanoid at Automate; unveils R-dog; releases the R-KNav navigation dataset. Signs a seven-year agreement with Sodexo — the largest single enterprise deployment in company history. The fleet reaches 4 million real-world tasks across ten countries.
Press coverage
Selected coverage in which Felipe Chávez Cortés is profiled, interviewed or quoted, ordered by prominence of the publication. Every item below is about this same person.
04
Full press archive — 25 more articles, interviews and appearances
More English-language coverage
Spanish-language coverage
Interviews, podcasts & talks
Recognition
- MIT Technology Review — Innovators Under 35, Latin America (2018), Software category.
- MIT Entrepreneurship Award (November 2018).
- UC Berkeley SkyDeck Global Founders programme, 2017 — and later a SkyDeck Fund portfolio company.
- Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative, Scaling programme, 2019.
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