Nvidia invests $10M in sidewalk robot delivery company Serve Robotics

The startup will use the funds from the investment to expand its sidewalk delivery service outside of Los Angeles and San Francisco.

The investment is part of a long-term collaboration that will see the two companies work together to advance their own wheelhouses of robotic technology.

The investment is the result of a long-term partnership with Serve using various technologies from us.

Serve's robots, which the startup says are capable of operating in specific areas without a remote operator for safety, currently rely on the Jetson edge artificial intelligence platform, the hardware, or compute module, that sits inside the robot. The startup uses Nvidia's perception and mapping tools, which help its robots understand where they are in the real world and where they need to go.

Serve tests its models in simulation before they hit the roads, which requires scores of data and maps of cities, like testing in the real world. Synthetic data generation tools are offered by Nvidia.

Offerings such as these come under a suite of tools from Nvidia, nicknamed Isaac, that provide robotic developers with a range of software technologies from simulation to robotic fleet management. The partnership with Serve will help the company improve its technology in the robotic space.

Ali Kashani, co-founder and CEO of Serve, told TechCrunch that the company is leading with autonomy and scaling real self-guided robots out in the real world.

There are different approaches to commercialization. Coco and Tortoise have used remote operators to drive their robots to their destinations, giving them a quicker and easier path to market than aiming for full autonomy.

Serve needs serious compute power to handle the processing of data in real time because it is choosing to go the more technically challenging route to full self-driving.

The sidewalk is more chaotic than the street. The randomness of the sidewalk is higher than the street. If you think about it, on the street cars have a set of actions, and they change lanes and decelerate. It is actually more challenging. The advantage is that things happen slower and you have more time to react.

This isn't the first strategic investment that Serve has seen. In December, the company raised $13 million in an expanded seed round, bringing on investors that are poised to help the company on its path toward commercialization.