Uber Technologies Inc.- and Nvidia Corp.-backed sidewalk delivery robots company Serve Robotics Inc. made its debut on the Nasdaq today, and unfortunately for investors, it wasn’t a great debut as shares in the company closed down more than 22% from the $4-per-share listing price on its first day of trading.

Previously known as Postmates X, Serve Robotics was spun off by Uber as a standalone company in 2021 a year after Uber acquired food delivery provider Postmates Inc. in a $2.66 billion deal in 2020.

Serve Robotics offers delivery robots that are boxes on four wheels designed to navigate an urban environment, including sidewalks. The robots can carry up to 50 pounds of merchandise for 25 miles on a single charge, said to be enough to make more than a dozen deliveries per day.

The robots navigate to their destinations with the help of a sophisticated sensor array that uses technologies, including lidar and sonar, to map out the environment. Earlier this year, Serve Robotics claimed that its robots had achieved Level 4 autonomy, meaning that they can operate without any human input in most situations. Where they encounter issues, such as aggressive locals, an engineer can remotely log into a robot and drive it manually.

The autonomous driving algorithms used by Serve Robotics are run on Nvidia Jetson chips. Each chip includes a central processing unit, a graphics card and an accelerator designed to speed up computer vision algorithms.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given it was spun out as a separate company from Uber, Serve Robotics provides robotic food delivery services for Uber Eats, with over 2,000 robots deployed for that purpose in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Serve Robotics did not undertake a traditional initial public offering, but instead listed through a reverse merger with an investment vehicle called Patricia Acquisition Corp. Under the terms of the reverse listing, Uber retained a 16.2% stake in Serve Robotics and Nvidia holds 11% of the company.

Why Serve Robotics shares dropped on its first day of trading may be simply down to its not being worth the valuation given to it. TechCrunch reported that the company had $207,545 in revenue in 2023 and lost $1.5 million. Robots may be perceived to be the future, but a company that barely makes more in revenue than a single branch of a third-tier fast-food outlet in a small American city is an interesting ask for investors and as it turns out, they weren’t all that impressed.

Image: Serve Robotics