Serve Robotics, a developer of autonomous sidewalk delivery robots, is expanding its business beyond robot delivery operations as it looks to become a technology provider for companies developing robotic systems.
The company, which emerged from Uber’s acquisition of Postmates in 2021 and went public in 2024, announced the launch of a new business division called Physical AI Services. Through this initiative, Serve Robotics will offer connectivity solutions and data tools to businesses building and operating robots.
Bedrock Robotics, a startup developing autonomous systems for construction equipment, is among its customers. Additionally, Serve Robotics is collaborating with T-Mobile to bring AI computing capabilities closer to robots. The company announced these developments alongside its third-quarter earnings.
“We are solving the problem of robots in human spaces,” Serve Robotics CEO and co-founder Ali Kashani said.
Serve Robotics currently develops two types of robots: its recognisable, googly-eyed sidewalk delivery robots and hospital assistance robots acquired through its acquisition of Diligent Robotics. However, the company has no plans to discontinue either business.
Instead, Kashani sees an opportunity to commercialise the technology developed for its own robotic fleet by offering it to businesses building robots for farms, warehouses, and other complex, unstructured environments.
“I kind of think of it as the AWS moment where we are taking the technology we’ve built for us, and we’re opening it up for more people to build on,” he said, adding this wouldn’t have been possible without developing its own robot fleet.
The expansion comes as Serve Robotics continues to grow its sidewalk delivery operations while diversifying its commercial partnerships. The company is gradually shifting its focus away from Uber towards other partners, including DoorDash and Wonder.
Through its new Physical AI Services division, Serve Robotics will introduce three technology offerings designed to support the development and deployment of autonomous robots.
The first, Serve Link, will connect robots operating in the field with AI systems hosted in data centres. This connectivity infrastructure will enable businesses to access more powerful AI models without installing all the required computing hardware directly onboard their robots.
“Any robotic application generally needs to connect the robots to some offline intelligence, whether it’s to collect data or do exception handling or whatever,” said Kashani. “It’s the connectivity piece that has to be really high performance. You need to be able to manage really unreliable networks and still reliably connect, and that’s what we solve.”
The second offering is a data curator tool that identifies unusual situations and edge cases from the large volumes of real-world data collected by robots. Companies can use these insights to improve their training datasets and refine AI models, ultimately enhancing robotic performance.
Serve Robotics’ third product is a real-world foundation-model data catalogue that uses information its sidewalk delivery fleet collects. The dataset will help train AI models to recognise, interpret, and navigate complex environments involving human activity.
Kashani said he had considered this business model for several years, drawing inspiration from Amazon’s approach to opening its internal technology infrastructure to external businesses.
“When the technology is so nascent, you have got to build the end-to-end application because that’s the only way you know what to build, but then over time, as the technology gets more advanced, a lot more people are going to be wanting to build similar things,” he said. “And what you want to do is to open your technology so others build with you and on your platform.”
