Sidewalk delivery robots are rolling into Chicago, Washington DC and San Jose as Serve Robotics partners with Grubhub
Serve Robotics is expanding fast, signing on Grubhub and entering four new cities. Its Q2 revenue jumped 404% year on year, but a quiet exit by Uber signals the company still has ground to prove.
Key points
- Serve Robotics announced a partnership with Grubhub, a food-delivery service owned by Wonder, to run sidewalk robot deliveries in Chicago, Los Angeles and Alexandria, Virginia.
- Serve launched in two additional markets, Washington DC and San Jose, California, both through its existing partnership with DoorDash.
- The company reported Q2 2026 revenue of $3.2 million, up 404% compared with the same quarter a year earlier.
- Uber, which originally created Serve as an internal division before spinning it off in 2021, has now sold its remaining stake in the company.
- Serve also unveiled a hospital delivery robot upgrade, a new piece of restaurant hardware called Beacon, and a small local depot model it calls a microdepot.
Serve Robotics builds small, wheeled robots that travel on pavements to deliver takeaway orders. Until now most of its business ran through DoorDash. This week the company added a second major platform partner: Grubhub, the food-delivery marketplace now owned by restaurant group Wonder.
The Grubhub deal puts Serve robots in front of more than 100 restaurants in Chicago and nearly 200 in Los Angeles from the start, with more expected to join. Wonder's own Alexandria, Virginia location will also offer robot delivery through the network.
What does this mean for people who order food?
If you order through Grubhub in those three cities, a robot could now show up at your door instead of a human courier. The robot carries your order in a sealed compartment, navigates the pavement on its own and waits at your building until you collect it.
For diners the experience is similar to a standard delivery notification, only the vehicle is knee-high and battery-powered. Serve says every completed trip feeds data back to improve the whole fleet, so the service is designed to get more reliable over time.
How is the business actually doing?
Serve's Q2 2026 numbers tell a mixed story. Revenue reached $3.2 million for the quarter, a 9% rise from Q1 and a 404% jump compared with Q2 2025. Revenue from the DoorDash partnership alone grew nearly 50% quarter on quarter, beating the company's own forecasts. Advertising, mostly brands paying to wrap robots in custom designs, made up close to half of food-delivery revenue.
The shadow over those figures is Uber. Serve was created inside Uber before becoming independent in 2021. Delivery volumes through Uber fell short of targets, and last week Bloomberg first reported that Uber had sold its remaining stake in the company entirely. Uber's exit had been signalled in regulatory filings for at least a year.
What else is Serve building?
Three new products arrived alongside the partnership news.
Microdepots. Serve is opening its first small local depot in Miami: a compact site that charges, stages and maintains robots without the construction time a full warehouse needs. The idea is to enter new neighbourhoods quickly and cheaply.
Beacon. A countertop device for restaurants that connects over a mobile network and alerts kitchen staff the moment a robot pulls up outside. It needs only a power socket, no tablet, no new software, no changes to existing systems.
Characters. Serve already lets brands wrap robots in custom artwork. The new Characters product goes further: a brand can create a persona that customers can speak to in real time, powered by a conversational AI model (software that holds a natural-language conversation, similar to a voice assistant). Grubhub's first Character is Chomp, a hamburger-themed robot.
Serve also updated its hospital robot business. Earlier this year the company acquired Diligent Robotics, which makes Moxie, a robot that ferries supplies and specimens around hospital wards. Diligent has now released Moxie 2.0, an upgraded version of that machine.
Common questions
Are these robots safe on pavements?
Serve's robots travel at walking pace and use cameras and sensors to detect obstacles. The company has logged millions of deliveries across its existing markets without a reported serious injury, though independent long-term safety data is not yet published in peer-reviewed literature.
Do human jobs disappear when robots deliver food?
Robots currently handle a small fraction of deliveries in the cities where Serve operates. The company frames the service as covering routes or times that are hard to staff, though the long-term effect on courier work is a genuine open question that researchers and regulators are watching.
