Serve is betting that food delivery and access to public markets are the keys to scaling robotics

Equity

TechCrunch

Founders, Silicon Valley, Finance, Ipo, Vc, Technology, Business News, Startups, Business, Venture Capital, News, Stock Market, Entrepreneurship, Techcrunch

4.2 • 365 Ratings

🗓️ 21 May 2025

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today on Equity, Rebecca Bellan caught up with Ali Kashani, co-founder and CEO of Serve Robotics, to unpack how Serve is navigating public markets, scaling real-world robotics, and building what it hopes is the future of last-mile delivery. Listen to the full episode to hear more about: How Serve went from a lidar-focused startup to a publicly traded company via reverse merger in 2023 What it takes to scale a delivery fleet across cities like L.A., Miami, and Dallas Why Kashani says Serve’s sidewalk bots collect four times more visual data per day than GPT-4’s vision model How ground robots 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 coverage from Max. Don’t miss it! Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. For the full episode transcript, for those who prefer reading over listening, check out our full archive of episodes here. Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. We’d also like to thank TechCrunch’s audience development team. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	This episode is brought to you by Affinity, the most trusted CRM for private capital.
0:17.5	Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups.
0:22.3	I'm Rebecca Boulon, and this is the episode where we bring on industry experts to help us explore a trend in the tech world and dive deep.
0:28.5	Today, we're joined by Ali Kishani, the co-founder and CEO of Serve Robotics, which is a sidewalk robot delivery company that's backed by Uber and Invidia, and I believe is the only one that's braving the public markets today.
0:39.8	Ali, welcome to the show.
0:40.9	Thanks for having me.
0:41.9	Yeah.
0:42.4	Listeners, we actually caught up last night at a really super cool, the most New York robotics salon, a salon of people who came to listen to Ali speak about robotics.
0:53.1	What did you think of that?
0:53.9	It was a lot of fun.
0:54.6	It was in like a one-bedroom apartment, packed with about 50 people,
0:58.7	brick-a-brack everywhere, books, balancing goblets of wine on top of stacks of books.
1:03.4	It was like the most New York thing I've ever done.
1:05.6	It was a very cool setup and very New York.
1:08.2	I think it's the most New York thing I've ever done.
1:10.2	Yeah, yeah,
1:11.0	we were talking and outside the window, you could just hear the rush hour traffic honking the horns
1:17.8	trying to get onto the tunnel to New Jersey. So yeah, I hope that wasn't too much for you coming
1:23.1	from somewhat calmer, I think, San Francisco. But it was a lot of fun. So, Ali, give us a little bit of your background all the way from LIDAR and DARPA to where
1:31.8	you are now.
1:32.5	Yeah, thank you.
1:33.5	So I have been obsessed with robotics one way and other for Lai.
	...

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