Serve Robotics opens its 2,000-robot sidewalk delivery fleet to third-party developers

Serve opens its fleet

Serve Robotics has launched a new developer portal that opens its fleet of roughly 2,000 sidewalk delivery robots to third-party software engineers, independent businesses and even autonomous AI agents, according to The Verge. The AV Delivery Developer Portal lets anyone in the 150 neighborhoods where the robots currently operate dispatch a machine directly through Serve's software tools, rather than routing orders through a major delivery platform such as Uber Eats.

How it works

Developers supply pickup and dropoff coordinates, while Serve's back end handles routing, obstacle avoidance and remote teleoperation supervision. API requests are treated the same as enterprise orders. "There's no preferential treatment at the end of the day," CEO Ali Kashani told The Verge. "Until the robot is on a delivery, it doesn't have a commitment to anybody."

Pricing is offered per delivery or as an hourly reservation, which Kashani says will come in at a fraction of the cost of human couriers. Beyond restaurant orders, the company points to use cases such as local shops adding robot delivery to their own websites and registers, repair shops moving parts between locations, intra-office shuttles and peer-to-peer handoffs like Facebook Marketplace sales.

Access is not unconditional, though. Every deployment is manually approved by Serve staff to guard against hazardous jobs or illicit cargo, and liability for lost or damaged goods will depend on how each partnership is priced and insured. The robots will also stay on the sidewalk: they top out around 6 mph, and Kashani says the company has no intention of expanding into street-based delivery.

A hedge against the delivery platforms

The launch follows Serve's decision not to renew its Uber Eats partnership, The Verge reports. The company, which was spun out of Postmates in 2021, has spent years fulfilling Uber Eats orders in Los Angeles, Miami, Dallas and dozens of other cities using boxy, cart-sized machines.

Kashani frames the open fleet as both a business hedge and a way to keep robots busy. Meal demand clusters around lunch and dinner, leaving idle hours in between. "Food is generally very picky. So you have lunch, you have dinner. But then there are times in between," he said. "Having that diversification helps."

There is also a straightforward economics case. Delivery apps such as DoorDash and Uber Eats typically take a 15 to 30 percent cut of each order, largely because paying human drivers is expensive. By connecting merchants like bakeries, florists and pharmacies directly to its fleet, Serve lets them offer delivery without those middleman fees — and Kashani argues that pushing robot demand into off-peak hours and new use cases drives operating and hardware costs down per delivery across the board.

Why it matters

Autonomous delivery has mostly run on closed models so far: one robot operator, one or two big platform partners, and everyone else reaching the machines through those partners. Serve is betting on the opposite approach, treating its fleet as programmable infrastructure that any developer, small business or software agent can call like any other API. If it catches on, a 2,000-robot sidewalk fleet becomes general-purpose last-mile logistics, and small merchants get a delivery option without surrendering a 15-to-30 percent cut per order. It is also an early, concrete test of two bigger questions: whether AI agents will increasingly orchestrate physical-world services on humans' behalf, and whether fleet utilization — not raw autonomy — is what decides whether sidewalk delivery robots can actually make money.