Editor’s Note: Through its Origin Ventures Office of Entrepreneurship, Gies College of Business is supporting entrepreneurial activities of both on-campus and online learners. The Origin Ventures Office fosters knowledge creation and dissemination by top faculty in the field and designs and offers the curriculum needed to bring that knowledge to the classroom. The office houses iVenture, an accelerator for top student startups at the University of Illinois, and co-sponsors the Cozad New Venture Challenge, which allows University of Illinois startups to compete for a $550,000 funding pool. This is one in a series of features on Gies teams participating in this year’s Cozad, which culminated in the finals on April 17.
University of Illinois students may soon have their lunch delivered by robots. At least that’s the vision of Jezzy Jia, a finance + data science major at Gies Business. Jia co-founded NexLoop, an autonomous delivery system that uses robots to move anything from food to lab equipment.
Their current prototype, a multi-compartment robot that Jia helped design, is 120x80 centimeters in size. Its multi-compartment design allows the system to carry multiple orders at once while supporting customizable delivery conditions, enabling different types of items such as temperature-sensitive lab equipment and hot food to be transported simultaneously within a single system.
“It’s a new challenge to have autonomous vehicles driving on the sidewalks,” said Jia, who serves as NexLoop’s CFO. “It is much harder to detect movement to ensure the safety of others as well as our robot. We are working on trying to allow the robot to distinguish between a stationary object and a person with an unpredictable pattern.”
The first goal of NexLoop is to train their first multi-purpose vehicle (MPV) on college campuses, because of their high-density and short-distance delivery areas. NexLoop is working to test the first robot at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, where several of the other members of the team attend. They have an agreement with Monash to have the first MPV operational by June and are negotiating with the University of Illinois on the feasibility of expansion there.
NexLoop has applied for a self-loading patent, which would differentiate the company from its West Coast competitors, Starship and Kiwibot.
“We plan to use AI dispatching from the beginning to train our robot to be more efficient in route optimization, and to dispatch our robot to be in the right place,” Jia said. The team is also supported by Ziqi Zhang, a postdoc from Grainger College of Engineering, who works closely with Nexloop on AI modeling and system architecture development.
The team is also working on the system side, intending to integrate their MPVs with autonomous road vehicle companies, like Waymo.
“We want to have this further integrated into the future autonomous transportation system,” Jia explained. “In the future, not only robots, but also other autonomous vehicles could be using this system. So, we’re focused on building the system behind the robot to scale across different autonomous platforms. For instance, we could transfer from small robots to big robots or put our boxes in the back seat of a Waymo.”
Over the past four months, Jia has been pitching and talking with investors. The startup is also participating in the Cozad New Venture Challenge to help refine its product market and raise funding.
“The Cozad activities have been super helpful to shape our professional pitch,” Jia said. “This was my first chance to pitch in front of a lot of people. Funding would be nice, but we are really focused on using Cozad to get in front of more VCs and companies to look at our company and be validated in the market.”
In addition to talking with campus leaders on parameters for using university sidewalks for NexLoop, the team plans to apply for the iVenture Accelerator and to leverage the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at Illinois for AI training.
Born in China and raised in New Zealand, Jia is not new to the entrepreneurial scene. He initially enrolled in the Department of General Studies at Illinois but transferred to Gies College of Business to complete his undergraduate degree in finance and data science. He credits his Finance 423 course, taught by George Krueger, for inspiring his interest in entrepreneurial business. Krueger connected him with University of Illinois alumni, which led him to help launch a company in New Zealand. The startup is doing well there and hoping to expand into North America sometime soon.