Nvidia and Uber-backed Serve Robotics has raised $80 million via a direct offering of 4.2 million shares of common stock. The fresh cash 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 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 new capital, which came from unnamed institutional investors, comes in the wake of $86 million in gross proceeds that Serve had raised in December 2024 through a combination of a filed at-the-market facility and an exercise of warrants. The startup has raised a total of over $247 million in the past 12 months.
Serve, which went public in April 2024 via a reverse merger, expects the $80 million offering to close on Tuesday. Serve wouldn’t say what it intends to use the cash for specifically, only noting that it would go toward working capital to build the business and deploy robots.
Read did note that Serve intends to use its cash reserves for self-funding equipment investments that will help it 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 interest 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 of 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,” he added.
Today, Serve has about 100 robots doing deliveries in Los Angeles for around 300 restaurants via Uber Eats and 7-Eleven. In October, the company began a trial in partnership with Wing in Dallas, combining sidewalk robots with drones for deliveries.
Serve plans to put an additional 250 robots on the streets of Los Angeles in the first quarter of 2025, and have 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 his company expects to be cash-flow positive 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.
