talabat, the leading everyday app in the MENA region, has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with QuikBot, an award-winning Singapore Deeptech company transforming final-mile delivery in dense, vertical cities, to launch a live pilot of autonomous delivery robots supporting riders in high-rise buildings. This collaboration is set to transform the way high-rise deliveries are handled, ensuring food reaches customers faster while making the delivery process smoother for riders.
The pilot connects talabat’s delivery network with QuikBot’s building-integrated robotics to tackle one of the most complex parts of the delivery journey. High-rise deliveries typically involve several time-consuming steps, building check-in, elevator transit, and navigating to the customer’s door, each adding to overall delivery time.
The pilot targets this final stretch directly: riders hand off orders to a QuikBot robot at a designated point within the building, and the robot completes the rest of the journey, taking the elevator and delivering to the customer’s door. Customers retrieve their order using a one-time password (OTP). By removing this segment from riders’ workload, the model has the potential to let riders complete more deliveries while giving customers a faster experience.
The robots operate through QuikSync, QuikBot’s trust layer for Physical AI, which gives each robot a cryptographic identity and governs its interactions with buildings and people. This infrastructure underpins QuikBot’s Autonomous Final-Mile Delivery (AFMD) Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), which already supports live operations with global logistics companies in Singapore and the UAE.
Simonida Subotic, Vice President & Managing Director, talabat UAE said: “This pilot with QuikBot allows us to explore how autonomous robotics can simplify the more complex parts of high-rise deliveries, from building access to elevator transit. It’s an early but important step in our broader commitment to innovation, and we’re looking forward to what we learn as the pilot progresses.”
The pilot is currently underway at Dubai Digital Park’s A6 commercial building in Dubai Silicon Oasis, where talabat and QuikBot are testing the model in a live delivery environment. Over the course of the pilot, the two companies will assess the time savings the model offers riders and how well talabat’s and QuikBot’s systems work together operationally, with an eye toward deeper product integration down the line.
Alan Ng, Founder & CEO, QuikBot said: “The future of autonomous delivery for Smart Cities in the Physical AI era will be won by infrastructure, not just robots. The building is the missing stakeholder in last-mile delivery: robots entering lobbies and lifts need verifiable identity, permission and accountability. QuikSync provides that trust layer, and our AFMD PaaS turns it into a new operating model for vertical cities.. The same infrastructure runs in reverse through First-Mile Pickup, with robots collecting orders inside malls and staging them at the curb for riders, returning an estimated 15 to 20 minutes of productive capacity to each rider every hour. This augments rider teams rather than replacing them. With talabat, Dubai Digital Park is our first proof point. The Smart City is next.”
The signing was marked with a ceremony in Dubai attended by both companies’ representatives. The partnership reflects talabat’s ongoing commitment to innovation, as the company continues to explore emerging technologies that can shape the future of delivery across the region. As the pilot progresses, talabat and QuikBot will use its findings to assess the case for a wider rollout of autonomous delivery robots across talabat’s operations, reinforcing talabat’s position at the forefront of technology-driven logistics and its broader efforts to improve delivery speed and the rider and customer experience across its markets.
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