The Sidewalk Robots Redwood City Invented Don't Deliver Here Anymore

"Why move two-pound burritos in two-ton cars?"

That's the question Serve Robotics co-founder and CEO Ali Kashani says set the whole idea in motion, back when the technology he'd eventually build was still a squat white cooler on wheels crossing Broadway at four miles an hour. The building where his company is headquartered today sits at 730 Broadway, a few blocks north of Courthouse Square, in the same downtown grid where the entire American sidewalk delivery robot industry took its first public steps.

Most residents who pass that address have no reason to connect it to anything. It reads like any other Peninsula office building. But the company inside now trades on the Nasdaq under the ticker SERV, employed more than 400 people as of this past summer, and carries a market capitalization north of $700 million as of this past spring. Its robots roll through Los Angeles, Miami, Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth, Chicago and Fort Lauderdale, with Alexandria, Virginia added late last year. What they don't do, at least not as a standing commercial service, is roll through Redwood City.

A City Council Vote Made This the Pilot City

In November 2016, Redwood City's City Council approved a nine-month pilot allowing Starship Technologies, an Estonian company founded by two Skype co-founders, to test autonomous delivery robots on downtown sidewalks. Staff reports at the time described it as the company's primary pilot program in the United States, running alongside a smaller test in Washington, D.C. The robots weighed about 50 pounds fully loaded, carried roughly three grocery bags' worth of goods, used nine onboard cameras to navigate, and moved at no more than four miles per hour. At crosswalks, a human monitor cleared each crossing before the robot proceeded.

City staff pointed to specific reasons Redwood City got the assignment over other candidates: a compact, walkable downtown and a resident base already comfortable ordering from services like Munchery and DoorDash. Economic Development Manager Catherine Ralston called the arrangement a chance to show "the tech world... that we are open to new technologies," and by late 2017 the council had approved extending the program and adding two more operators, Palo Alto-based Robby Technologies and San Francisco-based Marble Robotics. Ralston described the reception as strong, telling a reporter at the time that "the community seems to have really embraced them."

The library got interested too. Director Derek Wolfgram was exploring a partnership that would let residents request holds and have the books delivered by robot, an idea he framed as extending the instant gratification people already expected from e-books into physical checkouts.

Where the Lineage Actually Led

The company running today's robots isn't Starship, though Starship itself still operates internationally with more than 9 million completed deliveries. The line that matters for Redwood City runs through Postmates, which built its own early sidewalk delivery tests, got acquired by Uber, and eventually saw its robotics division spun out as an independent company: Serve Robotics, incorporated in 2021.

Serve went public via a reverse merger in mid-2023 and has spent the past two years scaling fast. Filings show the fleet expanded twentyfold since the start of 2025, and the company completed its 2,000th deployed robot milestone late last year, part of a stated 2025 goal. In January 2026, Serve announced it was acquiring Diligent Robotics, a Texas company that builds hospital robots for tasks like transporting lab samples and medical supplies, a move that pushed Serve beyond food delivery and into what the company calls a broader physical AI platform. By August, that acquisition had already produced a new product line, including an updated hospital robot called Moxi 2.0, alongside an expanded Grubhub partnership.

The company has kept collecting the kind of attention that shows up in national coverage. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang gave Serve a shoutout during his keynote at this year's Consumer Electronics Show. In March, Serve and White Castle launched an autonomous delivery arrangement through Uber Eats. None of it required a single robot to touch Redwood City pavement.

The Suburbs Kashani Named Weren't This One

Ask where Serve is headed next and the answer, at least as of an ABC7 interview earlier this year, points outward from downtown, not back into it. Kashani told the station he believes the delivery model could work in suburbs like Palo Alto or San Mateo, floating both as plausible next markets. He didn't mention Redwood City, despite it sitting two blocks from where the interview was filmed, despite it being the city that voted to let his industry's predecessor test robots on its sidewalks nine years earlier.

That's not an oversight worth reading too much into on its own. Serve's public roadmap has consistently prioritized high-density metro markets where delivery order volume can justify fleet size, and Redwood City's downtown, walkable as it is, doesn't carry the order density of Los Angeles or Chicago. But the juxtaposition still lands: the headquarters address hasn't moved off Broadway, and the company's own CEO reaches for neighboring suburbs before reaching for the one outside his office window.

What's Actually Still Here

Nothing about the original pilot infrastructure remains visible today. The two robot docking stations from 2016 are long gone, and there's no marked route or downtown branding tying the sidewalks to what started on them. What's left is the address itself, 730 Broadway, and a stock ticker that anyone can look up. The city that hosted the experiment doesn't appear in Serve's list of active delivery markets, in the company's own quarterly updates, or in its founder's list of likely next suburbs.

Wolfgram's plan for robot-delivered library holds was still in the exploratory stage when that 2017 report was written. The 2016 pilot on downtown sidewalks and Serve's current delivery cities are linked today by one address, the company's headquarters at 730 Broadway, which remains in Redwood City.

If you're curious what else has quietly shifted in downtown Redwood City, from its restaurant lineup to what a home near Broadway or Courthouse Square is actually worth these days, Christopher Fling tracks both the visible changes and the ones easy to walk past.