Now that Serve Robotics has been public for about a week, with its market cap hovering around $75 million, let’s take a look at the documents the company used to pitch its shares to key investors and the general public. While the full deck is available here, we’ll call out some of the most interesting slides below.
Serve starts by flagging that it was a named one of Time’s “Best Inventions,” but it’s less obvious that the award was given back in 2019, when the offering was still called “Postmates Serve.” To be fair, our memory of things pre-pandemic is also pretty fuzzy…
The whole delivery industry has perhaps used this statistic so often that it’s basically taken as common gospel. But it’s worth noting that… burritos do not actually weigh two pounds? Even a bowl (and bowel) bursting one from Chipotle tops out at about a 1.25 pounds. It’s also pretty hard to find a non-luxury “car” that weighs two tons, but if you expand that to include SUVs than there are certainly plenty of vehicles clocking in at 4,000 pounds and up.
More of Serve’s major shareholders are visible on Page 96 of this SEC document.
While Serve has kept its fleet size steady at about 100 robots for quite some time, it appears they now have the capital to start making good on their growth plans. On Wednesday, the company announced an expansion of its agreement with auto supplier Magna International, as the two groups look to build towards that 2,000 robot benchmark.
Per SEC filings (page 62,) the company estimates its robots can navigate over 80% of their operating environment with the help of a number of different AI models that detect people, objects and terrains and predict future state of dynamic actors. The company’s autonomous capabilities enable one remote supervisor to monitor up to four moving robots.
Maybe the biggest beneficiary of the robo-delivery wars is OOH firm Nickelytics?
In 2022, the United States had an estimated 283.4 million registered vehicles; 11x-ing that to 3.1 billion robots would be a lot of machines!