Uber has sold its entire stake in Serve Robotics, a move disclosed in a regulatory filing first reported by Bloomberg and one that caught the sidewalk delivery robot maker by surprise.
According to a person with knowledge of the events, the company only learned of the selloff after it had been officially announced. Uber, which did not respond to requests for comment, had already been trimming its stake through 2025.
Fate has been unkind to a once-close arrangement. Serve grew out of Postmates X, the robotics division of the delivery business Uber absorbed in 2020 for $2.65B, and became an independent company in 2021. Uber kept a hand in as backer and business partner, and roughly two years later the firms expanded their tie-up, with up to 2,000 delivery bots joining Uber’s app.
Tensions had been building for months. During Serve’s August 6 earnings call, CEO Ali Kashani pointed to a second-quarter slide in deliveries routed through Uber, the first such decline in 17 straight quarters, and blamed weak robot utilization. He described the pair’s approaches to running the shared fleet as fundamentally at odds and signaled the agreement, set to lapse in early 2027, would probably not be extended.
Serve’s deliveries with another food delivery partner grew nearly 50% in a single quarter over the same stretch.
Uber still plays in autonomy: the ride-hailing giant has partnered with or invested in more than 30 autonomous vehicle companies over the past several years, and Serve is one of them.
