Serve Robotics Launches 'Physical AI Services' to Become the AWS for Robots
Serve Robotics, a maker of self-driving sidewalk delivery robots, is expanding beyond its own autonomous delivery operations in a bid to become a technology supplier to other companies building robots.
The company — which spun out of Uber's acquisition of Postmates in 2021 and went public in 2024 — announced Thursday that it will launch a new business line called Physical AI Services.
Specifically, Serve Robotics will offer customers its connectivity and data tools. Bedrock Robotics, a startup developing self-driving systems for construction equipment, is already a customer, according to Serve. The company also announced it is working with T-Mobile to bring AI computing power closer to robots, alongside its third-quarter earnings report on Thursday.
"We are solving the problem of robots in human spaces," Serve Robotics CEO and co-founder Ai Kashani told TechCrunch.
Beyond Delivery: A Growing Robot Portfolio
Serve Robotics already makes two kinds of robots: its googly-eyed sidewalk delivery robot and a hospital-assistant robot obtained through its acquisition of Diligent Robotics in early 2026.
Those businesses are not going away, Kashani emphasized in a recent interview. Instead, he sees an opportunity to sell the technology developed for its own robots to other companies building robots for farms, warehouses, and other uncontrolled environments.
"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 said, adding that this wouldn't have been possible without developing its own robot fleet first.
A Shifting Delivery Business
The expansion comes as Serve's sidewalk delivery business continues to grow, but is shifting away from Uber toward other partners, including DoorDash and Wonder.
Three Products Under Physical AI Services
The new business line will offer three products:
- Serve Link connects robots in the field to AI systems running in data centers, allowing companies to tap into more powerful AI models without having to put all that computing power onboard.
- A data curator tool helps companies identify edge cases in the reams of real-world data a robot collects, which can then be fed back into a training model to improve performance.
- A real-world foundation-model data catalog built from Serve's own sidewalk robots, designed to teach AI models how to understand complex human environments.
"Any robotic application generally needs to connect the robots to some offline intelligence, whether it's to collect data or do exception handling or whatever," said Kashani. "It's the connectivity piece that has to be really high performance. You need to be able to manage really unreliable networks and still reliably connect, and that's what we solve."
The Amazon Playbook
Kashani said he has been thinking about this idea — a playbook he learned from Amazon — for years.
"When the technology is so nascent, you have got to build the end-to-end application because that's the only way you know what to build, but then over time, as the technology gets more advanced, a lot more people are going to be wanting to build similar things," he said. "And what you want to do is to open your technology so others build with you and on your platform."
via TechCrunch