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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Serve Robotics

Serve Robotics Partners With Drone Delivery Specialist Wing To Pair Sidewalk With Aerial Delivery

Serve Robotics Inc. and Wing Aviation announced a pilot program this week that will combine their delivery methods to extend the reach of restaurant deliveries across densely populated urban areas. According to the announcement, Serve’s robots will collect orders from restaurant curbsides and transport them to Wing’s AutoLoader hubs, where Wing’s drones will carry the packages to customers up to six miles away.

Serve Robotics spun out of Uber in 2021 and has since worked with the likes of Uber Eats and 7-Eleven. According to the company, its robots have completed tens of thousands of deliveries in urban markets. For its part, Wing, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet, says it has racked up 400,000 commercial deliveries across three continents, working with food delivery partners like DoorDash.

This announcement is interesting because it represents the first integration of sidewalk and aerial delivery. I’ll be watching if this thing ever moves out of pilot since, as drone delivery has moved significantly slower in terms of rollout than many providers had hoped, and combining it with sidewalk delivery adds another potential complication that could trip up cautious delivery operators and restaurants.

However, if Serve can nail handoffs at Drone pick-up areas as suggested in the video (the choppy editing looks a bit suspect to me), I can see this becoming a real peanut butter and jelly combo for quick deployment of food.

Watch as a Serve Sidewalk Robot Hands Off Food Delivery to a Wing Drone

Sidewalk Delivery Startup Serve Robotics To Go Public via Reverse Merger

Serve Robotics, the sidewalk delivery robot startup that began life as a research project within Postmates called X, is going public via reverse merger, The Spoon has learned. The news, first reported in Techcrunch, marks one of the first exits for a food automation startup and the first known exit for a sidewalk delivery automation startup.

According to Techcrunch, Serve is going public via a reverse merger with blank check company Patricia Acquisition Corp. Ahead of the reverse merger, which was completed earlier this month according to filings with the SEC, raised $30 million from existing Uber, Nvidia, and Wavemaker Partners.

The news is a rare bright spot in a tough stretch for food automation startups. Companies shutting down or laying off employees has become commonplace over the past 12 months as venture capital funding dries up, with hard-tech sectors like robotics getting hit especially hard. Basil Street Pizza, Pazzi, Chowbotics, and Creator have called it quits over the past year, while others like Picnic have had to lay off employees as they struggle to raise additional capital.

The journey from a skunkworks project to a publicly traded company has been quite the journey for Serve. Initially debuted in pretty much the same form factor as today’s big-eyed delivery bot in 2018, the Serve robot has gone from a Postmates project to a division within Uber to spinout to becoming a public company in the space of five years.

Company CEO Ali Kashani has been along for the entire ride, first serving as Postmates head of special projects in 2017 when Serve was first incubated within X, then serving as head of robotics at Uber, and later becoming CEO of the Uber spinout. And as of this month, Kashani is becoming CEO of a publicly traded company delivery automation startup.

Serve Robotics Strikes Deal With Uber to Scale Up to Two Thousand Sidewalk Delivery Robots

Uber Technologies Inc. is gearing up for a robotic future, bolstering its partnership with Serve Robotics Inc., a maker of sidewalk delivery robots. Following a successful trial in Los Angeles, the companies announced they would deploy up to 2,000 of Serve’s delivery robots in multiple markets across the United States. The deal marks one of the largest robotic delivery fleet deployments ever announced.

According to Serve, the expansion follows a year of strong growth, which saw the startup’s robotic deliveries grow 30% month over month since their introduction in 2022. Serve says that they currently serve over 200 Los Angeles restaurants.

“We are thrilled to be growing our partnership with Uber,” said Dr. Ali Kashani, co-founder and CEO of Serve Robotics. “This partnership is a major step towards mass commercialization of robotics for autonomous delivery, and it is a testament to the success of our partnership. We are excited to continue our work with Uber to bring this innovative technology to more cities across the country.”

For Serve, fleet expansion is made easier by the higher utilization of their robots in the field resulting from their fleets serving more than one customer in a given market. In the Los Angeles market, for example, the company’s fleet of about 100 robots delivers for both UberEats and 7-Eleven.

According to the company, they are eyeing San Jose, Dallas and Vancouver for possible expansion and have also started working with Pizza Hut in Vancouver and Walmart in Arkansas.

Long term, it will be interesting to see how cities begin to accommodate growing sidewalk robot traffic. Some cities have banned them, while others have begun to classify them as pedestrians.

Chili’s is Trialing a Sidewalk Delivery Robot From Serve Robotics

Hankering for some Chili’s but don’t want to jump in your car? It might not be long before that grilled chicken and bowl of chili arrive at your front door via sidewalk robot.

That’s because Chili’s parent company Brinker has been secretly piloting a trial with sidewalk delivery startup Serve Robotics and is evaluating the possibility of a wider rollout.

The first hint of the Brinker-Serve pilot came via a small mention last week in an article in a Dallas publication about the company’s drone delivery trials with Flytrex. Both Brinker and Serve have since confirmed to The Spoon that they are running an early stage sidewalk delivery pilot but were not ready to discuss further details of a wider rollout.

“We can confirm Serve is working with Brinker International to roll out robotic delivery for Chili’s customers,” a Serve spokesperson told the Spoon. “We will have more to share once service is launched.”

Chili’s Serve pilot is just the latest move into robotics by the casual dining chain. Last October, robot servers named Rita from Bear Robotics started showing up across the country. And as mentioned previously, the company started testing out a Flytrex drone in North Texas.

As more restaurant revenue share comes via off-premise delivery, chains like Chili’s are exploring drone and sidewalk delivery to counter the high cost of traditional delivery from the likes of Uber and DoorDash. Wade Allen, Brinker’s SVP of innovation, told Dallas Innovates that drone delivery is “a lot cheaper” than solutions that involve a human and a car. Likewise, the cost economics of sidewalk delivery robots are also likely to be much lower than that of traditional delivery.

For Serve, which began life as a division of Postmates and spun out of Uber last year, Brinker represents a massive opportunity with over 1,600 Chili’s locations worldwide. The trial comes on the heels of last year’s seed round with strategic investors Uber, 7-Eleven, and Delivery Hero, all of which represent potentially interesting opportunities for the company.

Sidewalk Robot Specialist Serve Raises $13 Million From Uber, 7-Eleven & Wavemaker Labs

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.

Serve Robotics Adds Former GoPro Exec To Lead Development of Autonomous Sidewalk Robots

Serve Robotics has hired Euan Abraham to head up the development of the company’s autonomous sidewalk delivery robots, the company has told The Spoon. Abraham, who in the past led the development of GoPro’s Karma drone and has also had stints leading engineering teams at Apple and smart lock company Otto, will become the company’s Vice President of Hardware Engineering effective January 2022.

The new hire is a sign the company is entering a new phase, according to Serve’s CEO, Ali Kashani, who sat down with The Spoon this week to talk about the hiring of Abraham.

A big focus for Abraham will be to take a company that has primarily been focused early on developing a robot and optimizing its capabilities through its initial trials in West Hollywood to one that can deploy large fleets at scale across multiple markets.

“This is a space that has kind of reached readiness for scale,” Kashani told The Spoon. “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.”

It’s not just about scaling but getting better, according to Kashani. “It’s easy to get distracted with scale where you lose your innovative edge. We want to continue to iterate on our hardware, and we don’t want to stop here. We want to keep making it better.”

The areas where Kashani thinks Serve can get better are areas where he believes the company already stands out from its peer group, the first of which is autonomy. He says Serve’s robots do most of the driving themselves, which has enabled Serve’s human teleoperators to manage more than one robot at a time.

This high level of autonomy wouldn’t be possible without the Serve’s built-in safety systems, another area where Kashani believes his robots stand out.

“Our robots have a lot of onboard safety mechanisms so that they can be independent. They can be there by themselves.,” Kashani said. “At the same time, they also have people backing them up. So we have the best of both worlds.”

Serve’s other major differentiator isn’t a technical one, but it may be the company’s biggest ace in the hole: its relationship with Uber. Earlier this year, Uber spun out the robot group which it had acquired as part of the Postmates acquisition, and this month, Serve announced that Uber would be the company’s first commercial partner. The two companies plan to roll out a fleet of robots to deliver food to Uber Eats customers across the LA market in 2022.

While Abraham’s hiring is undoubtedly a significant strategic move for the company, Kashani says they aren’t done. With Uber’s rollout of autonomous delivery and Serve eyeing new markets like the Bay area, Kashani says Serve has several areas the company is looking for more talent, including autonomous driving, operations, supply chain, and HR.

“We are always looking for kind of more folks to join,” Kashani said. “It’s a never-ending kind of story.

Q&A: The Future of Restaurant Delivery Bots, According to Serve Robotics’ Ali Kashani

If Serve Robotics CEO Ali Kashani has his way, more restaurants in the near-term future will offload the last mile of their deliveries not to human couriers but to wheeled rover bots that can autonomously traverse the streets en route to hand over your food.

Serve started life as a part of Postmates, eventually spinning out into its own company when the latter was bought by Uber. The wheeled Serve bots are all-electric, autonomous sidewalk rovers that require minimal human supervision to deliver burritos, sandwiches, and other food items to customers. They’re also, according to Kashani, way better for the planet and the restaurant industry.

Ahead of our upcoming upcoming Restaurant Tech Summit on August 17 (that’s tomorrow!), we caught up briefly with Kashani to get his thoughts on how robots help the restaurant biz and what role they’ll play in the future. Read our full Q&A with her below, and if you haven’t already, grab a ticket to the virtual show here.

This Q&A has been lightly edited for clarity.

The Spoon: What problem does Serve Robotics solve for restaurants/the restaurant industry?

Ali Kashani: Moving a two-pound burrito in a two-ton car doesn’t make a lot of sense. Yet it’s what we do 10 to 20 million times a day in the United States alone. It’s resulting in carbon emissions, traffic congestion, and accidents. Beyond that, it’s also expensive. Restaurants are paying 20-30% of their revenue to fulfill their customers’ delivery demands. 

Serve Robotics is creating a fleet of all-electric, autonomous sidewalk robots that require minimal human supervision. They don’t cause congested roads or emit CO2. They also don’t cause safety risks — it takes 3,000 sidewalk robots to have the same kinetic energy of a single street car. And finally, they make delivery affordable for restaurants and local businesses by significantly reducing the underlying costs. This is a win-win-win, for restaurants, for customers, and for cities. 

Starting with sidewalks, autonomous deliveries will reduce the cost burden that’s carried by restaurants today, while enabling more customers to shop locally — whether it’s from a nearby restaurant, a convenience store, or a local mall. And cities win too. If we take 5% of restaurant deliveries off the road in five years, which is our goal, we’d be removing 80,000 vehicles off the roads in the U.S., which translates to over 1 billion fewer miles traveled by cars.

By the way, robotic delivery will also be better for employment, as it helps local SMBs, the backbone of our economy, be better positioned to sell to local customers and compete effectively against larger e-commerce players. 

What is the biggest change in terms of the restaurant industry’s approach towards technology as a result of the pandemic?

Some impact was very visible to everyone, such as the adoption of digital menus almost overnight. Some other changes were uniquely visible to us. For example, robotic delivery as a whole was validated as a necessary tool, a part of city infrastructure, rather than a science project. Before the pandemic passersby would often wonder what a delivery robot was doing, but after the pandemic, everyone immediately recognized what they were seeing was a contactless delivery.

The impact of the pandemic has continued. Driver shortages have increased the importance of having several available delivery modes, creating significant inbound interest for us.

3. Where will we see the most deployments of delivery bots in the near-term future (e.g., major cities, campuses, etc.)?

We know from having access to food delivery data on major platforms that over half of all restaurant deliveries can be addressed on the sidewalk. Closed environments like campuses are a great place too. We decided to focus on cities instead because on campus basket sizes are smaller, so it’s a lower-margin space, and the demand is more peaky and seasonal. So all and all, the steady higher-value demand of cities made them a more interesting market.

Granted, cities are a harder problem to solve. We had to invest significantly in developing the right vehicle capable of navigating city sidewalks. But that’s a worthwhile investment that serves as a competitive barrier. With years and millions of dollars invested, we now have the most suitable robot for sidewalk delivery, with the largest cargo capacity, longest mileage range and battery life, and most capable drivetrain for handling the roughness of city sidewalks.

4. What are you most excited about when it comes to the impact of restaurant technology?

We’re excited by the experiences restaurants can potentially offer customers when delivery robots become a part of everyday life. There’s so much waste in how we deliver today — not just the car emissions mentioned earlier, but also in the packaging. Delivery is also not yet on-par with the experience of dining at the restaurant. 

Now imagine if the cost of last mile logistics was so low, that restaurants could send food in fine china and silverware. Similar to room service at a hotel, the robot would wait to return the dishes at the end of the meal. We could create new experiences that are similar or even better than dining in a restaurant, and do so at less cost and with less waste.

5. What do you think the restaurant industry will look like in five years?

Our goal is to take at least 5% of restaurant deliveries off the road, and bring down the cost of delivery overall. The impact this can have on our cities is enormous. From congestion and emissions, to the increase in customer adoption of local delivery, to the increase in employment and commerce opportunities.

Think about the kind of impact Ford had when they introduced the first car. Our cities look different today because of it. This would take longer than five years, but new forms of mobility offered by Serve and other companies in this space have similar potential to reshape our cities into more liveable and green places.

Postmates X Spun Out of Uber to Become Serve Robotics

Uber has officially spun out its Postmates X division to become its own standalone company now called Serve Robotics. The news was first reported by TechCrunch and confirms rumblings about such a move reported back in January.

Uber acquired Postmates for $2.65 billion last year, which included the Postmates X robotics unit. The Serve delivery robot is an autonomous cooler-sized rover robot currently making deliveries around the West Hollywood neighborhood of Los Angeles.

According to TechCrunch, Serve Robotics has raised an undisclosed seed round of funding led by the VC firm Neo, with participation from Uber, Lee Jacobs, Long Journey Ventures, Western Technology Investment and other investors. Serve Robotics will be led by Ali Kashani, who headed up Postmates X, will have 60 employees, and will be headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in Los Angeles, and Vancouver, Canada.

Delivery robots like Serve are definitely on the rise as a number of startups come to market around the world. In the U.S. Starship, Kiwibot and Refraction all have robots making deliveries. In Russia there’s Yandex, in South Korea there’s Woowa Brothers, and in Turkey there’s Delivers AI. (For more, check out our Delivery Robot Market Report available to our Spoon Plus members.)

With all these robotic solutions plus other autonomous vehicle options, Uber doesn’t need to have its own full-stack robotic delivery solution. As I wrote last month:

“…as Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi recently explained on Kara Swisher’s Sway podcast, his company is in the networking business. Khosrowshahi doesn’t think Uber needs to create the technology uses, it just needs access to the best technology that allows it to facilitate deliveries and ridesharing. That’s one reason Uber offloaded its autonomous driving unit at the end of last year.”

Additionally, spinning off Serve Robotics means that Uber itself does not need to devote resources to figuring out the patchwork of state, county and city laws when it comes to actually getting commercial autonomous delivery vehicles on public sidewalks and streets. The flip side of that however, is that dealing with this patchwork of regulations is something Serve will have to do on its own.