Serve Robotics Inc., a Redwood City-based food delivery robot company, is rolling out a new robot for the hospital floor.
Moxie 2.0, a health-tech robot, is entering a handful of hospitals and healthcare centers, including Providence Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica and Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.
Moxie comes from Diligent Robotics Inc., an Austin-based firm that Serve acquired in January for an undisclosed amount.
Robots have been used in warehouses and factories for decades, performing repeatable tasks in predictable, routine environments. But Serve wants to leverage data collected from its autonomous fleet to train machines to understand and make decisions in uncertain, erratic settings like hospitals, remote environments and even the battlefield. The company’s technology has been used in demining in Ukraine.
Acquiring Diligent was part of Serve’s foray into robotic answers for unexpected environments, much like the bumps and random construction zones that pop up along the streets of Los Angeles.
“There’s this huge white space where people usually live where we haven’t been able to bring robots before because it’s really complicated. A lot of things happen,” said Ali Kashani, Serve’s chief executive. “It’s a much more chaotic scene when you’re on a sidewalk or in a hospital hallway. That’s the place where we believe this technology is going to bring the most value and we don’t want to just limit it to the sidewalk.”
An experimental city
Up until 2025, Serve operated exclusively in Los Angeles. Citing the area’s density and difficult to navigate streets, the company has solidified L.A. as its experimental incubator.
That’s why Los Angeles will be the first to see Chomp, a burger-themed robot that leverages conversational artificial intelligence to talk to pedestrians on the street. Chomp, which was designed with Serve’s new food delivery platform Grubhub Holdings Inc., is part of Serve’s marketing initiative to create characters with its various brand partners.
“(L.A. is) one of the largest food delivery markets in the country, second to New York. It’s extremely diverse, has a really large population, lots of amazing restaurants, a great food scene and has a very positive, I think, relationship with new technology,” Kashani said. “I think it’s just really well structured for bringing this kind of innovation.”
