SERV
UBER
New routes, new robot playground
Serve Robotics spent Monday trying to change the conversation. After a bruising earnings report and a guidance cut earlier this month, the company announced a partnership with Grubhub — via Wonder — to roll out autonomous robot delivery in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Alexandria.
That means more than 100 participating Grubhub merchants in Chicago and nearly 200 in Los Angeles will be in the mix, plus Wonder’s Alexandria location. Translation: Serve is widening the map, and that matters because robotics companies don’t really get graded on vibes. They get graded on how many places their bots can actually go.
The Miami move
Serve also said it plans to open its first Miami micro-depots. Those little facilities will handle robot staging, charging, dispatch, and maintenance — basically the pit stops that let the fleet keep moving without turning every sidewalk into a startup science fair.
The company says the model should help it expand faster and lower costs. Investors tend to like those two words together. Especially after the stock has been under pressure and is still sitting way below its longer-term moving averages.
The Uber breakup energy
The backdrop, though, is a little messy. Uber recently sold its remaining stake in Serve, and the two companies appear to have drifted apart over their autonomous delivery partnership. That’s not exactly the kind of breakup that makes for a smooth investor road trip.
Still, the big question for you is simple: can Serve turn these new deals into real delivery volume before the market loses patience? The announcements give bulls something to point at. The chart, however, is still doing its best impression of a sad slope.
Big picture: Serve is trying to prove it’s more than a cool demo with wheels. If these partnerships translate into actual scaled deliveries, the stock story could get a lot more interesting.