Serve Robotics (SERV) expands autonomous platform to healthcare industry
Serve Robotics (SERV) said that it has acquired Austin, Texas-based Diligent Robotics, a provider of AI-powered robot assistants for the healthcare industry.
The transaction is an all-stock deal worth $29 million, including the potential earn-out of up to $5.3 million if certain milestones are achieved.
Serve notes that this deal marks the first expansion of its autonomy platform into indoor environments, calling hospitals "one of the most high-impact settings for robotics."
Diligent's autonomous delivery robot, called Moxi, supports nurses and hospital staff and has been deployed in over 25 hospital facilities in the United States. This makes it one of the largest deployments of mobile manipulation robots that work alongside human employees in the United States, according to a press release.
Moxi robots, which are powered by the NVIDIA Jetson platform for onboard compute, have successfully completed over 1.25 million deliveries within hospital facilities.
Northwestern Medicine, ChristianaCare and Rochester General Hospital are among the medical facilities that currently utilize the robots.
“This acquisition accelerates Serve’s evolution from a robotic delivery company into a full-stack autonomy platform,” Serve CEO Dr. Ali Kashani said in a statement. “We’ve proven we can deploy robots safely and reliably at scale in complex urban environments.By extending our platform beyond sidewalks and into hospitals, we’re expanding where our Physical AI can operate, learn, and create value."
The San Francisco-based company said that the merger will help further scale the deployment of Moxi robots, while also accelerating and expanding the reach of Serve's autonomy platform. The companies are expected to generate between $200K and $400K in annual sales from each hospital deploying Moxi robots.
Serve, which was spun off from Uber Technologies (UBER) in 2021, has completed over 100K deliveries for partners such as Uber, 7-Eleven, and Little Caesars, America’s third-largest pizza chain. It also signed a multi-year partnership with food delivery giant DoorDash (DASH) in October to deploy autonomous robot deliveries across the US.
The company said last month that it had achieved its goal of deploying more than 2,000 delivery robots in 2025, creating the largest autonomous sidewalk delivery fleet in the US.
"Over time, Serve and Moxi will share one autonomy stack, one data flywheel, and one operating system for robots that work alongside people across city sidewalks and critical institutions," Kashani added. "This is how autonomy becomes infrastructure.”
Since it was founded in 2017 by Andrea Thomaz and Vivian Chu, Diligent has raised over $100 million from investors like Tiger Global, True Ventures and Canaan. It will continue its operations as a subsidiary of Serve under the leadership of Thomaz.
“Diligent was founded to help healthcare teams do more with their limited resources,” Thomaz said in a statement. “By joining Serve, we can build on the autonomy and AI we’ve deployed across live hospital fleets and scale it faster, enabling more intelligent, capable robots in care environments.”
Serve's shares have gained 27.5% so far this year.