What happens when a company that has learned autonomy on busy sidewalks moves the same operational playbook into hospital hallways?
Serve Robotics is making a bet that the hardest part is not finding a new industry, but rather expanding the established discipline of the fleet into a new, smaller area. The company has announced that it will acquire Diligent Robotics for $29 million, and it will integrate the Moxi platform into a business that concentrates on outdoor delivery robots. Serve Robotics has launched over 2,000 sidewalk robots in the U.S., while Diligent’s Moxi is operating in over 25 hospitals, where robots have completed over 1.25 million tasks.
The strategic action is more about the “capability jump” and less about “healthcare” as a market category: indoors, in groups, with manipulation. Moxi brings a mobile platform and an arm, which allows it to open doors, press elevator buttons, and deal with the small frictions that make facilities automation expensive. Serve’s current robots for delivery have focused on outdoor navigation; the Diligent acquisition brings the other half of the autonomy equation interacting with the world while continuing to focus on robots that interact with humans rather than being safely enclosed.
Ali Kashani, co-founder and CEO of Serve Robotics, framed the combination in terms of a broader domain of operation rather than a start-over. In the robotics space, in general, you do have those two problem sets that you have to solve: the navigation and manipulation, Kashani said. Bringing those two together makes a lot of sense because, directionally, we want to go indoors, and we want to go into applications that require some level of manipulation. This is significant for robotics engineers because indoor robotics in hospitals involves repeatability, human-robot interaction, and building interface behavior.
Diligent has been using Moxi to prove that reliability can be measured in such tasks. The company has mentioned 110,000 autonomous elevator journeys in U.S. healthcare facilities, as well as the rate of over 20,000 fully autonomous elevator journeys per month. Andrea Thomaz, the CEO of Diligent, explained why this particular task is a milestone: Elevator navigation may seem trivial, but the uncertainty of shared spaces, real-time dynamics, and the need for accuracy make it one of many difficult tasks that humanoids need to perform when used in human spaces.
The value proposition that Serve brings to Diligent is the scale infrastructure. Kashani said that Serve was able to double its number of 100 robots to 2,000 in a span of a year, and he thinks that this infrastructure will “supercharge” Diligent. Diligent will remain the same with Thomaz leading the company. The timing of the acquisition is also in sync with the demand trends. The market for healthcare mobile robots was USD 3.8 billion in 2023 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 15.4% through 2032.
Serve’s announcement can thus be seen as a merge of capability: outdoor autonomy learning and indoor manipulation knowledge, both of which are founded on robots that are already operating in public, unpredictable environments. Serve expects the deal to close in the first quarter of 2026, with the possibility of further milestone payments, as per Serve.