Serve is betting that food delivery and access to public markets are the keys to scaling robotics

“The only thing worse than being a public company CEO is being a private company CEO right now,” says Ali Kashani, co-founder and CEO of Serve Robotics. Access to capital, he argues, is everything in robotics. And in today’s “FOMO-driven” venture climate, securing funds is far from guaranteed.

Backed by Nvidia and Uber, Serve recently raised $80 million to extend its runway through 2026. The company aims to scale from 100 sidewalk delivery robots in Los Angeles to 2,000 bots operating across U.S. cities by the end of this year and hit operational profitability once that fleet is fully deployed. It’s a bold play in a space where hardware, logistics, and data all collide.

Today on Equity, Rebecca Bellan caught up with Kashani to unpack how Serve is navigating public markets, scaling real-world robotics by using food delivery as a test ground, and building what it hopes is the future of last-mile delivery.

Listen to the full episode to hear more about:

• How Serve went from a Postmates spinout in 2021 to a publicly traded company via reverse merger in 2024.
• What it takes to scale a delivery fleet across cities like L.A., Miami, and Dallas, and why Serve isn’t launching on college campuses like its rivals. 
• Why Kashani says Serve’s sidewalk bots collect four times more visual data per day than GPT-4’s vision model.
• How ground robots and drones might work together to finally crack last-mile logistics.

Equity will be back Friday with our weekly news round-up, and special Google I/O coverage from Max. Don’t miss it!

Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Wednesday and Friday. 

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