Serve Robotics, a maker of self-driving sidewalk delivery robots, is expanding beyond its autonomous delivery operations in a bid to become a technology supplier to other companies building robots.
The company, which spun out of Uber’s acquisition of Postmates in 2021 and went publicin 2024, said Thursday it will launch a new business line called Physical AI Services.
Specifically, Serve Robotics will offer customers its connectivity and data tools. Bedrock Robotics, a startup developing self-driving systems for construction equipment, is a customer It’s also working with T-Mobile to bring AI computing power closer to robots, Serve announced alongside its third-quarter earnings on Thursday
“We are solving the problem of robots in human spaces,” Serve Robotics CEO and co-founder Ai Kashani told TechCrunch.
Serve Robotics already makes two kinds of robots, the cute googly-eyed sidewalk delivery robot and one designed for hospitals that it got through its acquisition of Diligent Robotics.
Those businesses are not going away, Kashani emphasized in a recent interview. Instead, he said there is opportunity to sell the technology it developed for its own robots to other companies developing robots for farms, warehouses, and other uncontrolled 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’s sidewalk delivery business expands, but is shifting away from Uber and towards other partners, including DoorDash and Wonder.
Its new Physical AI Services business line will offer three products. Serve Link helps connect robots in the field to AI systems running in data centers, which would allow companies to potentially tap into more powerful AI models without having to put all that computing power onboard.
“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.”
It’s also launching a data curator tool that helps companies find edge cases in the reams of real-world data a robot collects, which can then be fed back into a training model to improve performance. Its third product is a real-world, foundation-model data catalog built from Serve’s own sidewalk robots that can teach AI models how to understand complex human environments.
Kashani said he’s been thinking about this idea — a playbook he learned from Amazon — for years.
“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.”
Source: techcrunch.com
