Serve Robotics, the robot delivery platform that works with Uber Eats and other food delivery platform, is based in the heart of Silicon Valley. So why do its California robots operate exclusively in Los Angeles?
“L.A. is just very large and diverse. So you’re going to see a range of anything that you may see in and across many cities in the rest of the country,” Serve Chief Executive Ali Kashani said.
Serve Robotics announced a newer, bigger, better robot on Wednesday. The third iteration of its autonomous delivery robot – wheeled tubs with blinking “eyes” carrying food and drinks to peoples’ doors – are expected to roll the streets of L.A. in 2025. These new robots are supposed to be able to carry more items – like large flat pizzas – move twice as fast as previous iterations and travel twice as far on a battery charge. They are also meant to weather serious storms with improved water resistance and can brake faster to avoid collisions. The robot will also cost half as much to make as the previous generation.
“This is the most rugged and high-performing robot we’ve ever created,” Euan Abraham, the chief hardware and manufacturing officer of Serve Robotics, said in a statement.
A new robot
The company began as a division of Postmates, which saw L.A. as its largest market for deliveries. Postmates was later acquired by Uber. Serve Robotics spun out into its own company in 2021, armed with $56 million in funding from the likes of Uber and 7-Eleven to partner with more delivery companies and expand capabilities.
“It just made a lot of sense for us to launch in a city where we have the most merchants and customers,” Kashani said. “And it so happens that when you look at density, Hollywood is one of the densest areas in terms of the delivery volume.”
These new robots, which operate in West Hollywood, Hollywood and Koreatown, may have to brake for a familiar face: Coco, a Santa Monica-based robotic delivery startup that also drives around Koreatown and other enclaves of L.A.
Serve and Coco both have partnerships with Uber and tout the benefits of these automated delivery robots: They are more environmentally efficient for last-mile delivery of small goods than cars are. They also cost less and fill a gap in the delivery market – some delivery workers lose money when moving food short distances.
“There’s a lot of cases where a human driver is the best possible way to deliver things. There’s complicated drop off points,” Coco Chief Executive Zach Rash said. “You get the kind of reliability of having a robotic fleet, but then you get the flexibility of having that human carrier fleet.”
Expanding capabilities will allow robots to better triage complicated deliveries and rocky roads, encroaching on the 1.4 million Californians who call themselves gig workers. But studies have found that automation creates as many net jobs as it renders useless, just in different areas.
“If you ship from Chinatown, which could be just a few miles away, it costs about $10 today. If you reduce that $10 using robots to a dollar, you’re going to have a massive increase in local commerce,” Kashani said. “Which means, again, a lot more delivery folks. It’s also a lot more businesses and folks to hire to service those customers.”
