Serve Robotics is acquiring Diligent Robotics to expand from sidewalk delivery into healthcare, leveraging Diligent’s hospital-focused robot fleet to scale the platform across more patient-care settings.

The deal marks Serve Robotics’ first major move beyond food delivery and aligns with its long-term strategy to deploy autonomous robots across different environments.

Serve’s fleet has grown dramatically, from about 100 robots to over 2,000 in 2025, and its partnership with DoorDash supports deliveries in Los Angeles, signaling rapid growth in autonomous fleets.

Diligent brings hospital-ready capabilities such as secure badge access, elevator integration, reliable handoffs for lab samples and supplies, and experience deploying in multiple U.S. health systems, plus change-management templates and service-level commitments.

The merger emphasizes the strategic value of combining platforms: Serve adds scaling and fleet management, while Diligent contributes hospital operations, safety, and privacy know-how.

Integration plans envision Diligent operating with relative independence while adopting Serve’s software stack, focusing on validation, infection control, change management, and preserving patient privacy in clinical environments.

Success indicators include growing hospital deployments, higher robot utilization and on-time task completion, deeper integrations with elevator systems and hospital materials management software, and published time-saved metrics for staff.

The merged entity aims to unify Serve and Diligent under one autonomy stack and data flywheel to accelerate learning, deployment, and scalability across indoor applications.

Key risks include maintaining reliability in hospitals, ensuring easy nurse and technician interactions with robots, and navigating facility-specific differences in elevators and security protocols.

The broader strategic aim is for Serve to prove its autonomy and fleet software can operate in both outdoor and indoor, people-dense environments, potentially expanding into airports, campuses, and hotels while maintaining core capabilities.

Each hospital facility using Moxi is expected to generate roughly $200,000 to $400,000 in annual sales, with current customers including Northwestern Medicine, ChristianaCare, and Rochester General Hospital.

The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of 2026, subject to customary closing conditions including regulatory approvals and Nasdaq listing authorization for the issued shares, with a deal value of $29.0 million in common stock and potential earn-outs up to $5.3 million.