apartment, Mountz spent six months sketching out a new paradigm for sorting, picking and packing. He quit his day job in early 2002 to work on the fulfillment conundrum full-time.
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Out of work in the fall of 2000, Mountz, then 35, got a job with a digital set-top maker, but the problem of how to fill orders efficiently gnawed at him. Webvan's spendthrift ways become the stuff of legend: It pledged $1 billion to new warehouses and tens of thousands of dollars on fancy Aeron chairs without a glimpse of profits.
The company's founder and chief executive, Michael Mountz, started dreaming about how to pack boxes more efficiently while an executive at Webvan, the online grocer that flamed out in 2001. Kiva is proof that great ideas can be born in the midst of spectacular disaster. What remains to be seen is whether this 100-person company can weather an economic cycle in which most of its potential customers are loath to plunk down cash for anything. "Kiva has brought robotic technology and made it useful for smaller and smaller tasks." "The Kiva bots are to delivery what the PC was to the mainframe," says Laurence Plourde, vice president of Staples' central division. So far, the boxy Kiva bots are making a good first impression: Since the company began selling them in 2005, more than 2,000 have found work in warehouses in 12 states in the U.S., including ones run by Staples, Walgreens, shoe retailer Zappos and The robots, or bots, are built by Kiva Systems, a six-year-old Boston company bent on a singular mission: replacing the labyrinth of conveyor belts and humans that most distributors rely on to pack items in the online mail-order business.
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