Serve Robotics, the Nvidia and Uber-backed company developing sidewalk delivery robots, is expanding into a new field: healthcare.
The vendor said this week that it had acquired Diligent Robotics, a Texas-based startup developing an AI-powered hospital-assistant robot called Moxi. Serve did not disclose the financial terms of the deal.
Diligent Robotics will continue its operations as a subsidiary of Serve, under the leadership of CEO Andrea Thomaz.
The deal is expected to close later in the first quarter.
The acquisition marks the first time Serve has expanded into indoor robotic applications, though in a statement, the companies said they see a “common autonomy and AI stack,” accelerating deployment and scalability of assistive robots across industries.
Touraj Parang, Serve’s president and COO, told AI Business healthcare is a “high-impact environment” for robotics, making it a prime opportunity for expansion.
“Healthcare facilities demand reliability, safety and seamless operations around people,” Parang said. “These are all capabilities we’ve proven at scale in dense urban environments with our outdoor autonomous delivery fleet. Diligent brings the indoor counterpart to that.”
Diligent and Moxi
Since its founding in 2017 by MIT roboticist Thomaz and Georgia Tech roboticist Vivian Chu, Diligent has raised more than $75 million in venture capital.
The company’s Moxi robot, powered by AI giant Nvidia’s embedded hardware and software ecosystem, is deployed in more than 25 healthcare systems across the U.S., including Northwestern Medicine, ChristianaCare, and Rochester General Hospital.
This real-world validation, Parang said, is what motivated Serve to acquire Diligent. Together, the companies envision a symbiotic learning model in which indoor and outdoor robots will learn from each other on a shared data platform.
“This acquisition creates a learning flywheel across both indoor and outdoor autonomy,” he said. “Serve and Diligent will operate on a shared autonomy and AI stack, so every robot contributes data to the same physical AI platform and learns from the others.”
“The ultimate vision is a single shared platform that enables robots to navigate around people in complex environments,” he adds. “That’s a very hard problem. The more data you have, and the more real-world situations these robots encounter, the better the entire system becomes.”
While Serve’s immediate focus is on healthcare environments, including hospitals and elder care facilities, Parang says the platform has broader applications well beyond that.
“The same full-stack physical AI platform we’re developing for indoor and outdoor autonomy can be applied across many settings,” he says. “That includes food services, pharmacies, retail – basically anywhere robots can help make labor more productive and effective.”
Parang framed these expanded applications as steps in a broader push to create a system that supports widespread robotic use.
“Over time, we see Serve’s and Diligent’s robots operating on a single autonomy stack, a shared data flywheel, and one operating system for robots that work in social environments,” Parang says. “Our ultimate vision is for autonomy to become infrastructure, part of everyday life, helping wherever it can.”
