Serve Robotics sells its technology to other robot makers
· BehindLines newsroom
Serve Robotics, known for the delivery robots that roam American sidewalks, is opening a new business: offering other manufacturers the tools it built for its own fleet. According to TechCrunch, the offering, called Physical AI Services, was announced on November 5 alongside the company's quarterly results.
Three products for robots in the field
According to TechCrunch and The AI Insider, the offering rests on three elements. Serve Link connects robots operating in the field to artificial intelligence systems hosted in data centers. Serve Data Curator finds, in the data collected by the machines, the rare cases useful for training models. The third element is a catalog of real-world data, drawn from sidewalk delivery operations, meant to help models understand environments busy with people.
Chief executive Ali Kashani speaks of an "AWS moment": the idea is to open to third parties a technology first developed in-house. According to TechCrunch, he believes the connectivity piece has to be very high performance. The AI Insider also quotes his line: "Building a robot is only the beginning."
First customers and partners
According to The AI Insider, Bedrock Robotics, which equips construction machinery with autonomous driving, uses Serve Link to connect its machines over Wi-Fi, LTE, 5G and satellite. Target markets include construction, mining and autonomous trucking. TechCrunch adds that Serve is working with T-Mobile to bring computing power closer to the robots.
Serve already operates sidewalk robots and a hospital robot, from its acquisition of Diligent Robotics, TechCrunch recalls. According to the outlet, these activities continue, and sidewalk delivery is moving away from Uber toward partners such as DoorDash and Wonder.
The scale the company claims
The AI Insider reports that Serve claims more than 2,000 robots deployed in more than 40 cities and 27 hospitals. These figures come from the company itself and have not been independently verified.
What this changes
For robot makers, the offering lets them buy connectivity and data management rather than build them. For Serve, it adds a source of revenue that does not depend on its own deliveries. Neither source presents performance results for the new business; its commercial value remains to be shown.