Why Serve Robotics is acquiring a hospital assistant robot company

Serve Robotics, the sidewalk delivery robot company backed by Nvidia and Uber, is expanding into a new category with its latest acquisition: healthcare.

Los Angeles-based Serve Robotics announced Tuesday it was acquiring Diligent Robotics, a startup that builds robots named Moxi designed to assist in hospitals by delivering lab samples, supplies, and other tasks. The deal values Diligent’s common stock at $29 million.

Diligent Robotics was founded in 2017 by Andrea Thomaz and Vivian Chu and has raised more than $75 million in venture capital — most recently raising a $25 million funding round in 2023.

The acquisition marks Serve’s first foray beyond its food-delivery roots. The sidewalk delivery robots company was incubated inside food delivery company Postmates in 2017. The project continued after Uber bought Postmates, before spinning off in 2021. Serve went public in April 2024 via a reverse merger.

Serve co-founder and CEO Ali Kashani doesn’t view the acquisition as a big deviation from the company’s initial target.

While the company hasn’t focused specifically on healthcare thus far, how Diligent’s robot Moxi operates does fit squarely into the company’s thesis around last-mile delivery and robots that can navigate alongside humans, Kashani told TechCrunch in a recent interview.

“This is a kind of a classic example of a prepared mind meets opportunity,” Kashani said. “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.”

Healthcare wasn’t a specific goal for expansion either, Kashani said, but rather the companies were introduced at the perfect time. Diligent was looking to scale and Serve was opportunistically looking into new areas.

“We love the team; they have very similar DNA to us, which is, rather than building in a lab, they build in real life,” Kashani said. “It just seems like it’s really aligned with our mission.”

Diligent will continue to operate relatively independently within Serve, Kashani said. Diligent will tap into Serve’s software and tools to help them work toward scale and the companies will share tech and collaborate, he added.

Kashani said this isn’t a pivot for the company, nor does it mean that Serve is looking to acquire more startups, he added. Kashani, who emphasized that Serve is still very focused on its sidewalk-delivery robots, said they would “keep our eyes open” for interesting companies as potential partners, not necessarily acquisition targets.

Serve was able to grow its fleet of robots in 2025 from 100 to more than 2,000, he said. The company also signed a partnership with DoorDash to facilitate some of their deliveries in Los Angeles in October.

“Our sidewalk business is what’s fueling everything,” Kashani said. “It’s creating the technology. It’s one of the largest autonomous fleets in the world right now and developing that helps us create everything that we need in other applications.”