Serve Robotics (Nasdaq: SERV) has signed its first commercial urban delivery partnership outside of prepared food, teaming up with on-demand laundry service NoScrubs to fulfill laundry orders using its autonomous sidewalk robots in Los Angeles.
From burritos to bedding
The Los Angeles pilot, which launches this week in select neighborhoods, taps the same fleet of robots that Serve already uses to deliver food. Of the roughly 2,000 robots Serve operates across the United States, around 500 are deployed in Los Angeles. Those units will pick up sealed laundry bags from NoScrubs facilities and deliver cleaned items back to customers' doors, handing the bag off through the robot's secure cargo bin.
Fleet utilization is the unlock
Laundry pickups and returns largely fall outside peak meal-delivery windows, which means Serve can run more deliveries through robots that would otherwise sit idle between lunch and dinner. That improves unit economics for both companies: Serve gets more deliveries per robot per day, and NoScrubs gets a fixed-cost, contactless last-mile option in a category where margins are thin.
Why now — and where next
NoScrubs, which operates across seven U.S. metros, says online laundry services in the U.S. are projected to grow from roughly $40 billion in 2025 to about $130 billion by 2030. Serve views laundry as the first of several adjacent verticals — dry cleaning, retail, pharmacy and grocery — that share the same last-mile economics that made sidewalk robots viable for food delivery.
Serve's broader expansion
The deal extends Serve's recent push beyond its original Uber Eats roots. In January 2026 Serve acquired hospital robotics maker Diligent Robotics, bringing its physical-AI platform indoors. The NoScrubs partnership keeps the focus on sidewalks, but signals that Serve sees its city-scale fleet as a delivery platform rather than a food-only product. Sidewalk-robot delivery has been one of the more durable corners of the broader last-mile automation push that also includes drones.
What investors will watch
The pilot is small relative to Serve's overall delivery volume, but it is the first concrete read on whether the company can convert spare robot capacity into a second revenue stream without taking on new hardware spend. For NoScrubs, success in Los Angeles is the entry point to a multi-city rollout that would otherwise require its own driver network.
Reporting based on coverage from GlobeNewswire, Manila Times and Stock Titan.