Serve Robotics Partners with Little Caesars, Tesla Diner's Optimus Fails First Dinner Service
Coco targets 10k bots, Waymo hits 100M rides, EngineAI raises $140M
June was a huge month for robotics, with big fundraising hauls, new partnerships and hot hardware releases. Over at Ottomate, we stopped by the just-opened Tesla Diner & Drive-In and kicked the tires on VenHub’s novel autonomous vending kiosks. Catch up on the rest of the industry’s updates below!
Delivery Robotics, Drones & AVs
Serve Robotics is partnering with Little Caesars, delivering pizza via Uber Eats in Los Angeles, with expansion into Miami, Dallas and Atlanta planned shortly. Serve’s new hardware can hold four 16-inch pizzas plus sides and drinks.
Jetpak and Grasshopper trial cargo drones in Sweden.
Lyft partners with China’s Baidu to bring robotaxis to Europe, aiming for a roll-out in Germany and the U.K. next year. This come hot off the heals of an earlier AV partnership with Benteler Mobility.
Waymo hits 100 million rides across five American cities.
Coco Robotics expands fleet, targets 10,000 robots nationwide.
Jahez launches first delivery robotics operation in Saudi Arabia, in partnership with Robot.com / Kiwibot.
Editor’s note: guess Peykbot never pulled off that Saudi launch they had planned.
Humanoids
Tesla Diner’s Optimus broke down on the first day of operations.
Tesla’s overall production of Optimus is falling behind as well, with its target of 5,000 units produced by year’s end looking unlikely to be met.
Shenzhen-based EngineAI raises $140 million for mass production of humanoids.
KEENON Robotics debuts its first bipedal humanoid service robot: XMAN-F1.
Hugging Face launches Reachy Mini robot for hobbyists and tinkerers.
Back of House Automation
WOOHOO — an AI-powered restaurant led by “Chef Aiman” (🙄) heads to Dubai’s Burj Khalifa.
Keenon ranks first in commercial service robotics market share.
Chipotle invests in high-efficiency equipment, as the fast-casual chain eyes increased catering sales.
Farm & Sourcing Automation
Bonsai Robotics acquires Farm-ng, a year and a half after the latter’s $10M Series A.
4AG Robotics raises $40M Canadian for autonomous mushroom harvesting.
Industry Trends
New research suggests California’s $20 minimum wage for fast food workers lowered industry employment by 2.7%.
Robotics investments on track to hit $10.4 billion in 2025, eclipsing previous three years’ annual hauls.
Agtech valuations rose 59% in Q2, but deal activity fell 22.8% to $1.5 billion, across 118 deals.
Kiosks & Self-Checkout
VenHub expands to LAX and Hollywood.
In Other News
Augmentus raises $11M Series A+ for no-code bot programming. Berkshire Grey and Kardex demo AutoStore CarouselAI. Pharm Robotics automates dairy cow healthcare. Domino’s launches Domidog delivery pup. Cartken execs explain pivots from LMD to industrial robotics. Tesla Diner’s full menu revealed, details on its customer geofencing, middling reviews. Unitree Robotics preps for IPO. Pudu launches T600 for heavy payloads. Shinkei looks to improve fishing operations.