LOS ANGELES — On La Brea Avenue, a truck driver stops to let Otto pass at a crossing while a woman saddled with grocery bags gives her fellow pedestrian a sidelong glance. As if in response, Otto’s wide, round eyes blink innocently as he whizzes by.

Otto is one of a hundred autonomous sidewalk-delivery robots, all with different names, built by Serve Robotics. Founded in 2017 as the robotics unit of Postmates (which was later acquired by Uber), Serve spun off as an independent company in 2021 and went public on the Nasdaq this April. It’s backed by big names like Nvidia, which supplies it with AI tech, and its former parent Uber, which dispatches Serve delivery bots through Uber Eats. Like many young tech startups, Serve’s nowhere near profitable — its net loss in the first half of this year was more than 12 times the amount of revenue it pulled in — but its autonomous tech could help it scale and eventually make money.

If you’ve been to LA recently, you’ve probably noticed Serve’s four-wheeled boxes cruising alongside people who are either amused, confused, or just apathetic. The bots, which have been humanized with big “eyes,” names, and even emotive sounds to make people like them, have become an accepted part of the landscape. 

And more are coming. 

Last month Serve said it’s on track to unleash 2,000 robots in partnership with Uber Eats by the end of next year. Currently it has 100 bots, only 48 of which are active as of its latest earnings report. Scaling will involve expanding to new cities (options include Dallas, San Diego, and Vancouver). 

“We believe that this is suitable for most major or urban cities,” Aduke Thelwell, Serve’s head of investor relations and communications, told Sherwood. Serve says that over half of all US food deliveries are within a 2.5-mile radius, a good range for its tech. The company says its zero-emission bots have completed tens of thousands of deliveries. Last month, it announced a partnership with Shake Shack. 

“From a merchant perspective, they most care about the economics and the fact that ultimately this will become a cheaper offering,” Thelwell said. The upside for customers is that they don’t have to tip, but she said it could also be an exciting experience. Thelwell added that the bots’ autonomous nature can make them a safer, more reliable delivery option for everyone involved. 

“Our robots are primarily navigating autonomously,” Thelwell said. They’re equipped with cameras and lidar. “If they need help, if there’s ambiguity in the environment, they’ll essentially raise their hand and ask a human supervisor for a second opinion or for guidance.” 

Rival CoCo Robotics, which is privately held and whose bots have taken over Santa Monica sidewalks, has opted for a manual approach: its bots are piloted by remote operators with Xbox controllers.

Serve estimates that its robots can navigate over 80% of their environment autonomously, though they’re supervised by remote operators who can step in when necessary (think: a blocked path, a construction zone). “From a safety and reliability perspective, we took the view that autonomy was critical,” Thelwell said. 

When I visited Serve’s depot in West Hollywood, I got a look into the mysterious life of a sidewalk delivery bot, focusing on one named Milo. 

“Milo comes back home at around 10:30, 11 p.m. every night,” Dara Kashani, Serve’s business development and partnerships lead, told me. In keeping with the anthropomorphic vibe of the bots, I’d asked him to humanize their routine. “They come back very tired. They’ve worked almost 10, 11 hours that day,” Kashani said. The bots are then put to bed in their charging stations, where they replenish their batteries and get ready for the next long day. 

In the morning, Serve’s team returns to wake Milo and his siblings, making sure they’re clean, functional, and ready for the workday. At about 10:30, the bots will start taking orders and head out for the lunch rush. Serve has been delivering from LA restaurants since 2022, and Kashani said it now has more than 300 Uber Eats merchants opted in to accept bot delivery. Popular locations include Dialog Cafe, Tender Greens, and California Chicken Cafe. 

Out on the town

Serve’s bots roll out of the depot to complete deliveries in West Hollywood and Hollywood. They also work in Koreatown, but that’s more of a field trip, as they get carted into a van and dropped off there for the day. 

Back to Milo: an Uber Eats customer puts in an order for a protein bowl from Dialog Cafe. Dialog won’t know it’s been matched with a robot until Milo’s name and picture appear on the Uber Eats screen.

Milo leaves the depot and cruises over to Dialog, where he’ll wait outside for a café worker to fill his box with the protein bowl. The secure cargo compartment can be opened only by the merchant and the customer. Then Milo heads to the customer’s house, where he’ll wait outside for them to collect their bowl.

“Enjoy!” Milo might say, with a yum-face emoji appearing on his screen. At the depot, I was shown how the bots can “emote” with sentences like “excuse me,” delivered in a high-pitched robotic voice that is fairly undecipherable (but kind of cute nonetheless). 

Even if Milo doesn’t have another order lined up after completing his Dialog delivery, he doesn’t get to go back home to the depot. Instead, Milo will go and wait in what Kashani described as a “hot spot,” areas with a high concentration of restaurants that are likely to have orders. 

On occasions when a bot can’t complete its job — like if it’s been damaged or runs out of battery — an employee will be dispatched to fetch it, though Serve says this rarely happens. 

Kashani said the community often helps the bots when they get stuck, which was validated when I was stalking one around town and was recruited by another bystander to do exactly that. I was outside Sightglass Coffee, filming a bot as it headed for the intersection. It suddenly took a hard right turn and dropped off the sidewalk into a mulched area in front of a building. A few passersby eyed it with amusement, noting, “It’s stuck, it’s stuck.” 

As I approached the bot, I saw that his name was Kaseem and that he was “On Delivery,” which made me think he didn’t mean to steer into a hole. One man, noticing me filming, asked, “Should we help him out?” I agreed. Once we got Kaseem back on the sidewalk, I waited to see whether he’d continue on his merry way to complete the delivery. Instead, Kaseem stayed in the same spot for at least five minutes. This made me wonder whether we had really helped him or just moved him from a spot where he was waiting to find out his next order.

From what I observed following several Serve bots in the wild, they move cautiously, starting and stopping often while waiting for obstacles to pass. In one instance, a bot was stalled for several minutes at the entrance to a bank parking lot as a car, a delivery guy on a bike, and then a pedestrian all passed by. While Serve says its robots can travel up to 7 miles an hour, Kashani said the city doesn’t allow them to go more than 5. 

Serve is a fun idea. You feel like you’re in the future watching its bots roaming around LA. But the company is still a long way from profitability, and only just starting to see meaningful revenue. In the first six months of this year, Serve reported that it had generated $1.4 million in revenue and posted a net loss of $18 million. Last year, it had just $207,545 in total revenue and lost nearly $25 million. The year before that, it had $107,819 of revenue and lost almost $22 million. Read: it’s deeply in the red.

To become profitable it’ll need to scale, and do so in a way that’s cost-effective. Thelwell said advancements in Serve’s autonomous tech will be key. “In the long term, that autonomy is what’s going to drive the economics.” 

Serve has a competitive advantage in its relationship with Nvidia, which in July disclosed that it had bought a 10% stake in the startup (or 3.7 million shares). Thelwell said Nvidia’s cutting-edge tech has helped Serve improve its bots, allowing them to do more at a lower cost. Its latest robot has five times more computing power and 67% more battery life, and it can travel twice as far per charge — all for half the cost of the previous hardware. 

Thelwell said that when Serve scales up to 2,000 bots in service it expects “each robot to pay for itself within 12 months.” (The company wouldn’t say how much a bot costs.) Ultimately, the goal is to make the robots as autonomous as possible, which would allow one human to supervise many at a time. 

“Our vision is to get the cost of delivery down to $1,” Thelwell said. “The cost of labor alone would constrain that, unless we get to the point where humans can supervise many robots at a time, and that requires autonomy.”

Serve also has the advantage of having started inside a food-delivery company, unlike rivals. Thelwell said that’s given it a slew of data-driven insights to inform its delivery operations. 

Serve seems to be taking several pages from Uber’s playbook, including placing ads on some of its bots, as Uber does in its app. Thelwell suggested Serve’s bots could one day expand to delivering everything, from medicine to retail to returns, which Uber already does. But though it has strong ties to Uber, it may not stay exclusive forever. 

“Part of the point of becoming an independent company was that we could work with a range of players… and you do need density,” Thelwell said, suggesting that Serve could expand to other food-delivery apps.