Nvidia and Uber-backed Serve Robotics has raised $80 million in a direct offering of 4.2 million shares of common stock, money that will help the company extend its runway through 2026 and scale its fleet from the 100 robots on the streets of Los Angeles today to the 2,000 Serve hopes to deploy by the end of 2025 in multiple U.S. cities.
“We’re not taking the more money to just burn through it in the next year,” Serve CFO Brian Read told TechCrunch. “This is the long term coffer to help us as we get beyond these 2,000 robots.”
The $80 million, which came from unnamed institutional investors, is on top of the $86 million in gross proceeds Serve raised collectively in December 2024 through a combination of a previously filed at-the-market facility and exercise of warrants, bringing the startup’s total funding raised over the last 12 months to $247 million.
The sidewalk delivery robot company, which went public earlier this year via a reverse merger, expects the $80 million offering to close on Tuesday, subject to certain closing conditions. Serve wouldn’t say what it intends to use the gross proceeds for specifically, only noting it would go towards working capital to build the business and deploy robots.
Serve was more forthcoming with its plans for the $86 million raised in December, which will go towards self-funding equipment investments so that the startup can eliminate the need for equipment financing and associated servicing costs.
“I’ve been trying to get our cost of capital as low as possible, and the best way [previously] for us to do that was to finance our robots, which comes with interests costs and deposits and cash locked up and security interests on the hardware,” Read said. “We’ve moved past that now, so we get better cash flow. We have ownership on these robots now, so we’re really giving ourselves some more flexibility in our financial direction.”
“This funding not only solidifies that approach from today, but also we are now positioning ourselves from what 2026 and 2027 is going to start to look like,” Read continued.
Today, Serve has about 100 robots doing deliveries in Los Angeles for around 300 restaurants via the Uber Eats and 7-Eleven platforms. In October, the company began a trial in partnership with Wing in Dallas to combine sidewalk robot delivery with drone delivery.
Serve plans to put an additional 250 robots on the streets of Los Angeles in the first quarter of 2025, and up to 2,000 bots in multiple U.S. cities by the end of next year through a contract with Uber Eats. Read noted that the company expects to get to cash flow positivity from an operational standpoint once that fleet of 2,000 is at full utilization.
This story has been updated to include additional context and information from Serve Robotics CFO Brian Read.
