Uber surprised robotics company Serve by selling its entire stake

Uber has sold off its entire stake in Serve Robotics, the autonomous delivery robot company that spun out of the ride-hailing company more than five years ago.

Uber made the disclosure in a regulatory filing that was first reported by Bloomberg. Uber’s exit from Serve Robotics has been brewing for at least a year, according to regulatory filings that show the company reduced its stake in 2025.

Still, the final selloff came as a surprise to Serve, which learned about it once it was officially disclosed, according to a source familiar with the events. Uber could not be immediately reached for comment.

The divesture comes as the two once-tight companies have started to diverge on the business side.

Serve got its start as Postmates X, the robotics division of the on-demand delivery startup Postmates that Uber acquired in 2020 for $2.65 billion. A year later, the division spun out as an independent company called Serve Robotics, a name taken from the autonomous sidewalk delivery bot that was developed and piloted by Postmates X.

Uber not only backed Serve, it also struck a partnership with the sidewalk delivery robot firm in 2022. The companies expanded that partnership in May 2023 to deploy up to 2,000 of Serve’s sidewalk bots onto Uber’s app in multiple markets in the United States.

It seems that Uber started pulling back earlier this year, according to comments made earlier this week — and before Uber’s sold its shares — during Serve’s second-quarter earnings call.

“From the first quarter of 2022 through the first quarter of this year, delivery volume through Uber grew for 17 consecutive quarters. In Q2, that trend reversed for the first time. This was caused by lower-than-expected robot utilization,” Serve Robotics co-founder and CEO Ali Kashani said last week during the company’s second-quarter earnings call.

Kashani said on the August 6 call that the companies have “differing views” about the operating model to scale its shared autonomous fleet, including in areas such as fleet coordination or merchant integration. He noted that during the same timeframe, Serve Robotics saw deliveries with another food delivery partner grow nearly 50% in a single quarter.

As a result, Serve doesn’t expect that it would make sense to renew the partnership agreement with Uber when it expires in early 2027, Kashani said at the time.

Serve Robotics is one of more than 30 autonomous vehicle technology companies that Uber has either partnered with or invested in over the past several years.