The little delivery robot rolling past the taco place is about to get a cousin with an arm. Serve Robotics is buying Diligent Robotics, the maker of a hospital robot called Moxi that ferries lab samples and supplies through corridors rather than along pavements, in a deal that values Diligent's common stock at $29 million according to TechCrunch.
A further $5.3 million could go to Diligent shareholders if specified milestones are met, The Robot Report says. Serve expects the acquisition to close in the first quarter of 2026.
Here is what a company that has spent nine years perfecting the art of not running over pedestrians actually gets for the money. The arm. Serve's machines are extremely good at one half of the robotics problem, which is figuring out where you are and how to get somewhere without flattening anyone on the way. Moxi does that too, and then it opens the door and pushes the elevator button.
That second half has a name, and co-founder and chief executive Ali Kashani used it plainly. "In robotics, in general, you do have those two problem sets to solve: the navigation and manipulation," he told The Robot Report. Manipulation is the business of touching the world and changing it, and it is the part that keeps roboticists up at night, because a wheeled box that bumps a wall is embarrassing while a gripper that mishandles a tray of blood samples is something else entirely.
Diligent's robots run in more than 25 hospitals and have completed over 1.25 million tasks, The Robot Report says, from a fleet of roughly 100 machines. Serve's own fleet is twenty times that size. "A year ago, we had deployed 100 robots, and we scaled to 2,000," Kashani said, which is the whole logic of the purchase compressed into one sentence: Diligent has the harder robot, Serve has the factory and the field data.
Andrea Thomaz, who co-founded Diligent in 2017 with Vivian Chu, stays on to lead it, and the company will keep operating relatively independently inside Serve. TechCrunch reports Diligent has raised more than $75 million in venture capital, most recently a $25 million round in 2023.
Serve's own history is a reminder of how strange this corner of the industry is. It started life as a project inside the food delivery firm Postmates, survived Uber's purchase of Postmates, spun out on its own in 2021, and went public in April 2024 through a reverse merger. Nvidia and Uber both back it. Last year it raised more than $100 million and bought the assets of Voysys and Vayu Robotics.
Kashani is careful to say the sidewalk business is still the engine. "Our sidewalk business is what's fueling everything," he told TechCrunch, and he described the healthcare move as opportunistic rather than a change of direction, saying the two companies were introduced at the right moment.
The part worth watching is what the indoor fleet feeds back. "Expanding the operating domain from just outdoors to now also indoors gives access to some unique data to teach robots how to navigate new environments," Kashani said. Hospital corridors are crowded, badly lit, full of people moving unpredictably, and nothing like a suburban pavement, which is exactly why the footage is worth having.
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