'It will happen' Co-founder of Skype bets big on delivery robots coming to your door

City dwellers have long been used to rapid delivery of takeaway food and, increasingly, groceries. But what they are not used to - yet - is the sight of a robot pulling up at their door. The co-founder of Skype Ahti Heinla believes his new venture will change that.

- Jasper Jolly

He is the chief executive of Starship Technologies, a startup he claims is able to operate deliveries by robots at a profit - and cheaper than a human delivery driver, even in small towns and villages.

"We've solved everything that there is to solve," the Estonian businessman told the Guardian over lunch at a London hotel.

"You could count how many years this is or how many months this is. But it will happen. It's very clear it will happen."

Residents of Manchester, Leeds, Cambridge and Milton Keynes - as well as across Finland and Estonia - have received food and groceries from the robots. They made an appearance at a Downing Street garden party and on The Bear, the hit US restaurant drama. Starship has made 8m deliveries with only 200 employees and the company wants that number to rocket.

Heinla has already made a lot of money by co-creating software that became a verb: to Skype.

In 2000, he was a video game developer who was hired by Skype co-founders, Niklas Zennström and Jaan Tallinn, a fellow Estonian, to write some code quickly.

That became the filesharing program Kazaa, and then, using similar tech, Skype. The six-strong founding team ended up selling to the online auction house eBay for $3.1bn (£2.3bn) in 2005.

That was an age ago in tech - Skype closed this year - and Heinla said of that time: "It's almost like a different me."

Heinla would not reveal how much he made, but he could, he said, do the ex-tech boss thing of flying in private jets if he wanted to.