Serve Robotics acquires hospital robot maker Diligent Robotics

Serve Robotics announced Tuesday it is acquiring Diligent Robotics in a transaction that values the startup’s common stock at $29 million. The acquisition represents the sidewalk delivery company’s first expansion into the healthcare sector, moving beyond its historical focus on food delivery. Diligent builds robots named Moxi, which are designed to assist in hospitals by delivering lab samples, supplies, and performing other tasks.

Diligent Robotics, which was founded in 2017 by Andrea Thomaz and Vivian Chu, has raised more than $75 million in venture capital, including a $25 million funding round in 2023. Meanwhile, Serve Robotics has been scaling its own operations after going public in April 2024 via a reverse merger—a process where a private company goes public by merging with an existing public shell company. Serve itself was incubated inside Postmates in 2017. The project continued after Uber bought Postmates, before spinning off in 2021. Today, the company is backed by investors including Nvidia and Uber.

Serve co-founder and CEO Ali Kashani frames the acquisition as a strategic alignment rather than a fundamental shift in strategy. Kashani notes that the core technical challenge of navigating autonomous machines among people is highly transferable from sidewalks to hospital corridors. “Robots that are moving among people is the broader opportunity for us. Once you solve the problem, which is how to get robots to seamlessly move among people as autonomous machines, then you can bring it to a lot of other environments. We knew that we wanted to do this someday,” Kashani said.

Under the terms of the agreement, Diligent will continue to operate relatively independently within Serve. Diligent will tap into Serve’s software and tools to help scale its operations, and the two companies will share technology and collaborate. Kashani emphasized that the transaction is not a pivot, and Serve remains highly focused on its core sidewalk delivery business. Serve grew its robot fleet in 2025 from 100 to more than 2,000 robots. This expansion follows a partnership signed in October with DoorDash to facilitate deliveries in Los Angeles, which serves as the primary operational hub for the company’s sidewalk-delivery services.

Why it matters

By acquiring Diligent, Serve Robotics is testing the thesis that autonomous navigation software developed for city sidewalks can be seamlessly ported to indoor hospital environments. The move signals a broader ambition to deploy autonomous machines across diverse, human-centric sectors beyond last-mile food delivery.