Serve cuts 2026 guidance to $9 million and lines up Grubhub to keep 2,000 robots busy

Serve Robotics added Grubhub as a delivery partner and opened two more cities.

The sidewalk-robot company announced the moves Monday as it works to replace revenue it lost when its Uber Eats deal fell apart.

Where the Grubhub robots start rolling

Grubhub customers in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Alexandria, Virginia, can now get food delivered by one of Serve’s autonomous robots.`

At launch, 100+ restaurants in Chicago and almost 200 in Los Angeles will be participating in the service, with Serve expecting more to sign up.

Grubhub is owned by Wonder, a food-technology company that also operates its own restaurant brand. Wonder’s Alexandria kitchen will dispatch orders to Serve robots too.

“Our partnership with Serve brings autonomous delivery to Grubhub customers in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Alexandria, while also enabling robot delivery from Wonder’s Alexandria location,” PJ Poykayil, Wonder’s EVP of Customer Delivery Operations, said.

Serve CEO Ali Kashani contextualized the deal in terms of scale. Each platform Serve taps into expands the number of restaurants and neighborhoods its ~2,000 robots can reach, he said.

Serve, Kashani told investors in last week’s second-quarter earnings call, isn’t planning to renew its Uber deal in 2027, citing what he described as “differing views” on how the robots should be deployed.

The volume of deliveries running through Uber fell for the first time since 2022, Kashani said. Serve cut its 2026 revenue guidance from $26 million to a range of $9 million to $10 million.

The day after the earnings call, Uber said it had sold its entire stake in Serve, a company that spun off from the ride-hailing firm more than five years ago.

“I have a lot of respect for Uber. They kind of helped us bootstrap this,” Kashani said. “We just have a different idea for what we want next.”

Serve Robotics expands to two new DoorDash cities

Serve opened its seventh and eighth U.S. markets Monday, both via DoorDash. They are San Jose, California, and Washington, D.C.

The two metros combined have about 8 million people, joining Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, and Miami on Serve’s map.

The company’s first Bay Area site, in San Jose, has already completed its first month of deliveries. The Washington rollout includes Dupont Circle and parts of downtown, and Talkin’ Tacos is among the first restaurants signed up.

Serve is utilizing small, existing sites for robot staging, charging, dispatch, and maintenance, including established parking structures for the Washington rollout.

The first one is opening in Miami, Serve says, and the model allows it to move into new neighborhoods without the typical build-out time.

As Cryptopolitan reported last year, DoorDash debuted an in-house robot called Dot in Phoenix.

Serve’s Diligent Robotics unit in health care has begun shipping Moxi 2.0, a hospital robot. The company claims Moxi 2.0 can sense its surroundings up to 15 times faster than its predecessor, features 10 times the onboard computing power, has a runtime of up to 18 hours, and charges 30% faster.

Early deployments include Endeavor Health Edward Hospital near Chicago, Providence Saint John’s Health Center in Los Angeles, and Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.

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