Ahti Heinla, Starship CEO: From Internet Calls to Robot Delivery

We sit down with Ahti Heinla, CEO of Starship Technologies, to explore how he’s helping reshape the physical world through robotics.Before building fleets of autonomous delivery robots, Ahti was the Chief Technical Architect of Skype—where he played a key role in transforming how the world communicates. Now, he’s applying that same systems-level thinking to one of the most complex challenges in logistics: last-mile delivery.In this conversation, Ahti shares his journey from building foundational internet infrastructure to deploying robots in the real world, and what it takes to move from software to physical systems at scale. We dive into the evolution of autonomous delivery, the challenges of operating in unpredictable environments, and why robotics is closer to becoming part of everyday life than most people think.From communication to transportation, this episode explores what it looks like to build technology that fundamentally changes how the world works.