Serve Robotics, the autonomous sidewalk delivery robot spinout of Postmates (which itself was acquired by Uber), has announced a $13 million expanded seed round of funding. The new funding round includes several strategic investors, including former parent Uber Technologies, Delivery Hero backed DX Ventures,7-Eleven Inc.’s corporate venture arm, 7-Ventures, and Wavemaker Labs.
According to the release, Serve plans to use the new funding to accelerate its technology development and expand into new markets. The company, which has been trialing its delivery bot in the West Hollywood neighborhood, recently started to expand its executive ranks as it prepares to scale.
“This is a space that has kind of reached readiness for scale,” Serve CEO Ali Kashani told The Spoon in November. “So we are at a very pivotal point where we are no longer trying to develop something. We have developed something, and now we are putting it to use.”
For each of Serve’s new strategic investors, an alliance with the sidewalk robot company potentially adds another arrow to their automation quiver. For its part, 7-Eleven has been trialing autonomous automobile delivery with its partner Nuro in the California market, but has yet to partner up with a sidewalk robot partner. It will be interesting to watch if the company begins to trial with Serve in the California market in the coming months as it expands its efforts in autonomous delivery.
European delivery giant Delivery Hero had some early trials with sidewalk delivery startup Starship, but has since been relatively quiet on the sidewalk delivery front. However, the company’s head of special projects for its middle eastern delivery group, talabat, recently hinted that delivery robots and drones could become commonplace in the near future.
“I do see delivery robots being implemented quite soon, in specific scenarios,” said Maria Estevan, Head Of Special Projects at talabat, in a recent article on Delivery Hero’s website. “We can already see it at foodora, it’s already there. We just need to make it bigger, scalable, and adapted to the conditions of each country, its requirements, regulations, and culture. But to me, they are actually already here.”
For Wavemaker Labs, the company has largely been investing and incubating a lineup of different food robots ranging from its back-of-house frybot in Flippy from Miso, an autonomous pizza-making machine in Piestro, and its robotic kitchen robot in Nommi. With Serve, the food robotics-focused venture studio adds a food delivery robot to its portfolio of investments for the first time.
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