Dive Brief:

• Entrepreneur Louis Borders, which has seen his chain of bookstores and his turn-of-the-century same-day delivery service ultimately fail, is developing a robot-powered grocery delivery company, Re/Code reports.

• The service, first reported by Re/Code last year, is a grocery-focused same-day delivery company that will rely almost solely on robots for fulfillment.

• Borders’ “Home Delivery Services” will be a $99 annual membership delivery service that would delivery goods beyond groceries as well, he says.

Dive Insight:

Louis Borders, like most entrepreneurs, is intrepid, certainly. And his robot-powered vision could work. Its main problem is that the whole shebang sounds an awful lot like a little retail enterprise already scaled up, by the name of Amazon, from the price to same-day grocery delivery serviced by robots.​

One thing that's different: HDS doesn't yet have any retailers signed up for its marketplace, although the business is still working on building its robotics system.

If this system does come into fruition, Borders envisions that less than 10% of orders will be filled by humans. Borders’ company has signed up Toyota’s manufacturing, which has his system in reserve, once it’s up and running, to provide an automated fulfillment system. According to Borders, that could help decrease operating costs and improve delivery times.