The only thing even worse than being a public company CEO is being a private business CEO right now, says Ali Kashani, co-founder and CEO of Serve Robotics.
Access to capital, he argues, is everything in robotics.
And in todays FOMO-driven venture environment, protecting funds is far from guaranteed.Backed by Nvidia and Uber, Serve just recently raised $80 million to extend its runway through 2026.
The business intends to scale from 100 pathway shipment robotics in Los Angeles to 2,000 bots running across U.S.
cities by the end of this year and hit functional success once that fleet is fully deployed.
Its a bold play in a space where hardware, logistics, and data all collide.Today on Equity, Rebecca Bellan caught up with Kashani to unload how Serve is browsing public markets, scaling real-world robotics by using food delivery as a test ground, and constructing what it hopes is the future of last-mile delivery.Listen to the full episode to hear more about: How Serve went from a Postmates spinout in 2021 to a publicly traded company via reverse merger in 2024.
What it requires to scale a delivery fleet throughout cities like LA, Miami, and Dallas, and why Serve isnt launching on college campuses like its rivals.Why Kashani says Serves walkway bots gather four times more visual data each day than GPT-4s vision model.How ground robotics and drones might work together to finally crack last-mile logistics.Equity will be back Friday with our weekly news round-up, and special Google I/O protection from Max.
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