Serve Robotics, the sidewalk delivery robot company backed by Nvidia and Uber, is expanding into a new category with its latest acquisition: healthcare.
based in Los Angeles Serve Robotics announced Tuesday that it is acquiring Diligent Roboticsa startup that makes robots called Moxi designed to help hospitals deliver lab samples, supplies and other tasks. The deal values Diligent’s common stock at $29 million.
Founded in 2017 by Andrea Thomaz and Vivian Chu, Diligent Robotics has raised more than $75 million in venture capital — most recently raising a $25 million funding round in 2023.
The acquisition marks Serve’s first foray beyond its food delivery roots. The sidewalk delivery robot company was hatched into food delivery company Postmates in 2017. The project continued after Uber bought Postmates, before it disappeared in 2021. Serve went public in April 2024 through a reverse merger.
Serve co-founder and CEO Ali Kashani doesn’t see the acquisition as a big departure from the company’s original goal.
While the company hasn’t specifically focused on healthcare so far, the way Diligent’s Moxi robot works fits perfectly with the company’s thesis on last-mile delivery and robots that can navigate alongside people, Kashani told TechCrunch in a recent interview.
“This is kind of a classic example of a prepared mind meets opportunity,” Kashani said. “Robots that move between people is the biggest opportunity for us. Once you solve the problem, which is how to make robots move seamlessly between people as autonomous machines, then you can take that to many other environments. We knew we wanted to do that at some point.”
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Healthcare wasn’t a specific target for expansion either, Kashani said, but rather the companies came in at an ideal time. Diligent was looking to scale and Serve was looking opportunistically in new areas.
“We love the team; they have a very similar DNA to us, which is, instead of building in a lab, they’re building in real life,” Kashani said. “It just seems like it’s really aligned with our mission.”
Diligent will continue to operate relatively independently within Serve, Kashani said. Diligent will leverage Serve’s software and tools to help them work at scale, and the companies will share technology and collaborate, he added.
Kashani said this is not a core focus for the company, nor does it mean Serve wants to acquire more startups, he added. Kashani, who stressed that Serve is still very focused on curbside delivery robots, said they will “keep our eyes open” for interesting companies as potential partners, not necessarily acquisition targets.
Serve could grow its fleet of robots in 2025 from 100 to more than 2,000, he said. The company also signed a partnership with DoorDash to facilitate some of their deliveries in Los Angeles in October.
“Our sidewalk business is what fuels everything,” Kashani said. “It creates the technology. It’s one of the largest autonomous fleets in the world right now and it’s being developed that helps us create everything we need in other applications.”
