Serve Robotics to acquire Diligent Robotics in $29M deal

An artificial intelligence-powered Austin company, Diligent Robotics, will be acquired by another Nvidia-backed robotics firm in a deal valued at $29 million in stock.

Serve Robotics, a Bay Area-based company that develops outdoor food-delivery robots, announced the acquisition Tuesday afternoon. The deal expands Serve beyond delivery into medical robotics.

Diligent Robotics, founded in Austin in 2017, designs robots to work alongside hospital staff in health care settings. Its flagship robot, Moxi, is powered by Nvidia Corp. AI chips and assists nurses and pharmacy staff by transporting lab samples and delivering medications. The company has deployed more than 100 robots in 25 hospitals nationwide, with expected annual revenue per hospital ranging from $200,000 to $400,000. Diligent has raised more than $100 million in capital investment.

Serve said Tuesday that Diligent will continue operating under the leadership of co-founder and CEO Andrea Thomaz.

“Diligent was founded to help healthcare teams do more with their limited resources,” Thomaz said. “By joining Serve, we can build on the autonomy
and AI we’ve deployed across live hospital fleets and scale it faster, enabling more intelligent, capable robots in care environments. Together, we’re unlocking the next phase of practical, real-world robotics and advancing a people-plus-robots model that prioritizes human impact.”

Serve told the American-Statesman that Diligent will continue operating in Austin and does not plan to relocate to California. Diligent employs about 215 people at its offices on East Cesar Chavez Street, and Serve said it has no plans to change the size of the workforce.

Serve Robotics is acquiring Diligent in a deal valued at $29 million in Serve common stock, with an additional $5.3 million tied to future performance milestones. The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of 2026.

Serve Robotics was founded in 2017 as a division of food delivery app Postmates. The publicly traded company went independent after Postmates was acquired by Uber in 2021. Serve has deployed more than 2,000 autonomous delivery robots in cities nationwide, including Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth, Fort Lauderdale, Fla. and Alexandria, Va.

In its third-quarter results posted in November, the company reported $687,000 in revenue and anticipated full-year 2025 revenue to be $2.5 million. 

The acquisition marks Serve’s first move into indoor robotics and the health care industry. In its announcement Tuesday, the company said the deal is expected to accelerate the deployment of Moxi robots and increase revenue per deployment.

“This acquisition accelerates Serve’s evolution from a robotic delivery company into a full-stack autonomy platform,” Ali Kashani, CEO of Serve Robotics, said in the announcement. “We’ve proven we can deploy robots safely and reliably at scale in complex urban environments. By extending our platform beyond sidewalks and into hospitals, we’re expanding where our Physical AI can operate, learn, and create value. Over time, Serve and Moxi will share one autonomy stack, one data flywheel, and one operating system for robots that work alongside people across city sidewalks and critical institutions. This is how autonomy becomes infrastructure.”