Rebecca Bellan, a senior reporter at TechCrunch, recently caught up with Ali Kashani, co-founder and CEO of Serve Robotics. They discussed the company’s audacious plans for scaling robotics in food delivery and strategies for breaking through to public markets. Serve Robotics began life as a Postmates spinout in 2021 and went public via a reverse merger in 2024. To do that, the company has taken on a new mission: reimagining last-mile delivery through sidewalks’ most adorable delivery partner.
Kashani provided additional context on how Serve Robotics is using food delivery as a proving ground for its real-world robotics. By focusing on this sector, the company hopes to refine its technology while addressing the practical challenges of last-mile logistics. He explained that data collection is going to be key to improving the performance of these robots.
Serve Robotics’ sidewalk bots are allegedly gathering four times more visual training data each day than has been used to develop GPT-4’s powerful vision model. This massive volume of data is instrumental to making the bots’ navigation safer and more efficient, providing greater operational efficiency. Kashani remarked on the current climate for public company CEOs, stating, “The only thing worse than being a public company CEO is being a private company CEO right now.”
Beyond the immediate transition to these technologies, Bellan unpacks what this indicates for the tech industry as a whole. He takes a deep interest in topics concerning autonomy, AI and electrification. She has tackled topics surrounding gig work platforms and Big Tech regulatory scrutiny, demonstrating her expertise in the field.
On a personal level, Bellan has invested in Ethereum, showcasing her own interest in nascent technologies and global financial trends. Her insights are priceless for anyone wishing to grasp Serve Robotics. They allow us to understand the bigger picture of innovation across sectors that is shaking things up.
Theresa Loconsolo, audio producer over at TechCrunch, Equity podcast specialist. She highlighted that this signature podcast is on the leading edge of informing communities with its weekly news round-ups and its special coverage. The program serves as a platform for discussing pivotal moments in tech and business, further illuminating the landscape that companies like Serve Robotics operate within.
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