Serve Robotics Opens Its Robot Connectivity and Data Tools to Other Robot Makers

The unit launched alongside third-quarter results in which the Nasdaq-listed company reported revenue of $2.8 million, up 313% from a year earlier, and raised its full-year 2026 revenue guidance to $12 million from a previous range of $9 million to $10 million. It also lowered its full-year non-GAAP operating expense guidance to $150 million, from $160 million to $170 million, and ended September with about $198 million in cash and marketable securities, the company said.

The new line is an attempt to earn money from robotics infrastructure rather than only from deliveries, a business where volumes are still small and costs are high. Chief executive and co-founder Ali Kashani compared it to Amazon opening up its internal computing systems as Amazon Web Services. "I kind of think of it as the AWS moment where we are taking the technology we've built for us, and we're opening it up for more people to build on," he told TechCrunch.

Physical AI Services starts with three products. Serve Link connects robots in the field to AI systems running in data centres, so customers can call on larger models without carrying all the computing power on board. A data curation tool picks out edge cases from the large volumes of real-world data a robot collects so they can be fed back into training. The third is a data catalog for training foundation models, drawn from Serve's own sidewalk robots, intended to help AI systems understand busy human environments.

Bedrock Robotics, a start-up building self-driving systems for construction equipment, is a customer, Serve said, and the company is working with T-Mobile to bring AI computing closer to robots. Kashani said the tools are aimed at companies building machines for farms, warehouses and other uncontrolled settings. "It's the connectivity piece that has to be really high performance," he said. "You need to be able to manage really unreliable networks and still reliably connect, and that's what we solve." The company has not disclosed pricing.

Kashani said the delivery and hospital businesses will continue. Serve spun out in 2021 after Uber's acquisition of Postmates and went public in 2024. It added a hospital robot through its acquisition of Diligent Robotics, and in the third quarter signed 12 multi-year contract extensions with hospital customers, bringing the number of new hospitals added this year to four. Recurring revenue made up 69% of the total, and the company launched its first international city, in Australia, in October.

Its delivery business is moving away from Uber towards other partners including DoorDash and Wonder, TechCrunch reported. Serve said daily delivery volume with its newer platform partners tripled during the quarter.

The company remains small and loss-making against its ambitions. Its market value was about $226 million, according to TipRanks data, well below the cash it holds plus the expectations that once surrounded sidewalk delivery. Whether outside robot makers pay for Serve's tools will be the first test of the strategy, and the company has named only one customer so far.