Serve Robotics, the sidewalk delivery robot company backed by Nvidia and Uber, is expanding into a new category with its latest acquisition: healthcare.
Los Angeles based Serving Robotics announced Tuesday that he got it Hardworking Roboticsstartup that builds a robot called Moxi designed to help hospitals by delivering lab samples, supplies, and other tasks. The deal valued Diligent’s common stock at $29 million.
Diligent Robotics was founded in 2017 by Andrea Thomaz and Vivian Chu and has raised over $75 million in venture capital – most recently raising The funding round is $25 million in 2023.
The acquisition marks Serve’s first sign of expanding beyond its food delivery roots. The sidewalk delivery robot company was incubated at the food delivery company Postmates in 2017. The project continued after that Uber bought Postmatesbefore Spinning dies in 2021. I will go public in April 2024 through a reverse merger.
Serving co-founder and CEO Ali Kashani doesn’t see the acquisition as a major departure from the company’s initial goals.
While the company hasn’t focused specifically on healthcare so far, how Rajin Moxi’s robot operates is the company’s thesis on delivery and the ultimate robot that can navigate alongside humans, Kashani told TechCrunch in a recent interview.
“This is a classic example of a mind ready to meet an opportunity,” Kashani said. “Robots that move between people are more opportunities for us. Once you solve the problem, that is how a robot can move smoothly between people as an autonomous machine, then you can bring it to many other environments. We know that we want to do this one day.”
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Health care was also not a specific target for expansion, Kashani said, but the company was introduced at the right time. Diligently looking for scale and Serve opportunistically looking for new territory.
“We like the team; they have the same DNA as us, that is, instead of building in the laboratory, they build in real life,” said Kashani. “It seems to be very much in line with our mission.”
Diligence will continue to operate independently of Serve, Kashani said. Diligence will use Serve’s software and tools to help them get closer to scale and the companies will share technology and collaborate, he added.
Kashani said this is not a pivot for the company, nor does it mean Serve wants to acquire more startups, he added. Kashani, who stressed that Serve is still very much focused on sidewalk delivery robots, said it would be “eye-opening” to interesting companies as potential partners, not necessarily acquisition targets.
Serve could increase its robot fleet by 2025 from 100 to more than 2,000, he said. The company also signed a partnership with DoorDash to facilitate some deliveries in Los Angeles in October.
“Our sidewalk business fuels everything,” Kashani said. “It’s creating technology. It’s one of the largest autonomous fleets in the world today and it’s growing which helps us create everything we need in other applications.”