Startup founders should care more about Serve Robotics’ listing | TechCrunch

We love mergers and acquisitions right here at TechCrunch. We even type of like reverse mergers. However this newest improvement within the robotics trade certain has us excited!

Supply robots maker Serve Robotics is going public via a reverse merger with a blank-check company, and it raised $30 million simply earlier than the deal. That might be nice for the corporate, however we’re extra within the visibility this deal grants us into the economics of constructing, deploying and operating a fleet of supply robots.

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On one hand, utilizing folks to maneuver items round cities is pricey and might contribute to congestion and air pollution. On the opposite, when has something about robotics been low-cost?

Utilizing tech as a substitute of flesh and blood often ends in financial savings — you solely want to go searching your self to understand the advantages of the commercial revolution and the Web. However robotics can show difficult even for smaller sidewalk-level units, regardless of recent advances.

So, how good is Serve’s enterprise? We have no idea. What we are able to inform from the numbers, nevertheless, is that it’s nonetheless early days for firms deploying a whole lot and even hundreds of robots to convey you meals and groceries.

Serve’s numbers

When an organization information to go public, we often sigh with pleasure as a result of we get to pore over its previous couple of years’ monetary outcomes to grasp the enterprise’ well being and valuation prospects. Serve doesn’t match that mannequin effectively.

The corporate recorded no income in 2021 and managed a mere six figures of topline in 2022, so we’re not coping with your conventional tech store on its technique to the general public markets. Serve has a superb cause for working to go public, although: As my colleague Kirsten wrote, following the SVB disaster, the corporate discovered itself on unsure monetary floor, which led its co-founder and CEO Ali Kashani to take a more in-depth have a look at the corporate’s strategy to elevating capital, and he determined Serve wanted a broader scope of traders.