Sidewalk delivery robots are rolling into Chicago, Washington DC and San Jose as Serve Robotics partners with Grubhub
Serve Robotics has signed Grubhub as a second major platform partner and entered four new cities. Q2 revenue jumped 404% year on year, but Uber's quiet exit is a reminder the company still has ground to prove.
Key points
- Serve Robotics announced a partnership with Grubhub, a food-delivery marketplace owned by Wonder, to run sidewalk robot deliveries in Chicago, Los Angeles and Alexandria, Virginia.
- Serve launched in Washington DC and San Jose, California, both through its existing DoorDash partnership.
- The company reported Q2 2026 revenue of $3.2 million, up 404% on the same quarter a year earlier.
- Uber, which created Serve as an internal division before spinning it off in 2021, has sold its remaining stake in the company.
- Serve also unveiled a hospital robot upgrade, a countertop restaurant device called Beacon, and a compact 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. 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 instead of a human courier. It carries your order in a sealed compartment, navigates the pavement on its own and waits at your building until you collect it. The experience looks much like a standard delivery notification, except the vehicle is knee-high and battery-powered.
How is the business actually doing?
Serve's Q2 2026 numbers tell a mixed story. Revenue reached $3.2 million, a 9% rise from Q1 and a 404% jump on Q2 2025. 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 entirely. Uber's exit had been signalled in its 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, dispatches and maintains robots without the construction time a full warehouse needs. The idea is to enter new neighbourhoods quickly.
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 and 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 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.
On the hospital side, we covered the upgraded Moxie 2.0 from Diligent Robotics in our story on 17 August. Diligent, which Serve acquired earlier this year, has now released that machine to health systems across the country.
For patients and hospital staff, Moxie 2.0 matters more than any of Serve's street-level announcements. Sidewalk deliveries are a convenience; a robot that reliably ferries specimens around a ward overnight is a different category of useful. Watch whether the hospital revenue line starts to show up separately in Serve's next quarterly filing.
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 existing markets without a reported serious injury, though independent long-term safety data hasn't been 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.
