According to a story by TechCrunch, American multinational giant Nvidia is investing USD 10 million in Serve Robotics. Back in December 2021, Serve Robotics had raised USD 13 million in an expanded seed round, bringing on investors that are poised to help the company on its path toward commercialization. Nvidia’s investment will help the startup to further expand its sidewalk delivery robot service outside Los Angeles and San Francisco.
TechCrunch reported that Serve’s robots, which the startup says are capable of operating in specific geofenced areas without a remote operator for safety, currently rely on Nvidia’s Jetson edge AI platform, the hardware, or compute module, that sits inside the robot and powers autonomous movement. The startup also plans to use Nvidia’s perception and mapping tools, which will help its robots understand where they are in the real-world environment and where they need to go.
Serve also tests its models in simulation before they are deployed on the sidewalks, which, like testing in the real world, requires scores of data and photorealistic maps of cities. Nvidia offers synthetic data generation tools for training perception models towards that purpose.
The investment is part of a long-term collaboration that will see the two companies work together toward advancing their own wheelhouses of robotic technology.
