San Francisco-headquartered Serve Robotics, an autonomous sidewalk delivery company, has snapped $80 million via a direct offering of 4.2 million shares of common stock. The capital came from undisclosed institutional investors and comes in the wake of $86 million in gross proceeds that Serve had raised in December last year through a combination of a filed at-the-market facility and an exercise of warrants.
With the latest funding, the startup has raised a total of over $247 million in the past 12 months. Previously, in 2023, the company closed $30 million in a funding round.
The fresh cash will help the company extend its runway through 2026. It will also scale its fleet from the 100 robots on the streets of Los Angeles today to the 2,000 Serve hopes to deploy by the end of 2025 in multiple US cities under its deal with Uber Eats.
Self-driving robots to deliver food
Founded by Ali Kashani and Dmitry Demeshchuk in San Francisco in 2017, Serve Robotics the autonomous sidewalk delivery robot startup started as Postmates X, the robotics division of Postmate, an on-demand delivery company, and started delivering to Postmates customers in Los Angeles and surrounding areas.
Following Uber’s acquisition of Postmates in late 2020 for $2.65 billion, Postmates X spun out as Serve Robotics. It was named after the autonomous sidewalk delivery bot that was developed and piloted by Postmates.
Serve Robotics is shaping the future of sustainable and self-driving delivery. It designs, develops, and operates zero-emissions robots that serve people in public spaces, starting with food delivery. It is set out to build a robotic delivery experience that delights customers, improves reliability for merchants, and reduces vehicle emissions to zero.
Collaboration with NVIDIA
The company utilises advanced technologies from partners like NVIDIA, whose Jetson platform powers the AI computing in Serve’s robots. Serve’s latest Gen3 robot is powered by NVIDIA’s Jetson Orin platform and includes all the hardware and software it needs to run advanced robotics and computer vision. Gen3 is 5x more powerful than the previous generation, translating into a 50% reduction in operating costs. In other words, its faster top speed, wider range, and longer operating time make it far more efficient.
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