Serve Robotics (SERV) CEO on White Castle Partnership & AI Expansion into Hospitals

0:00Let's welcome back to our show, the serve robotics team. In fact, the CEO, Ali Kashani, is with us so nice to see you all again. We've seen you here with your robot delivery unit. It's an exciting, exciting prospect for the future. And you had a great fourth quarter where you beat and you raised guidance. So where do we stand in this world of autonomy and delivery? Seems like it's pretty hot right now. Indeed, thanks for having me back, Nicole. Look, robots are real. We've been saying this for a while. You had me on the program a few times. I appreciate being here again to just report on the progress. We promised we were going to launch 2000 robots last year. I'm going to five or six major cities. We've done exactly that. We're actually in 20 distinct municipalities across six metros with 2,000 robots right now, which is quite incredible. And we're very proud. So it's amazing here because I know that you're going to be talking

1:01about some of the partnerships. But the expansion that you're doing globally, I mean, what are the prospects in your term and long term for you in your mind? We're actually looking at a number of markets, both inside the United States, additional cities, as well as outside from Europe to Asia, to Australia. Canada has been top of the list. So I'm hoping to have more to say about it. But I think you're going to see our robots outside of the US this year and much more of them next year. What are you hoping to say more about it? I don't understand. So is this going to come by the back half of the year? Want to hear more about this? Honestly, the only reason I'm not able to give details is a lot of this depends on other partners. Like the cities we are talking to, you know, we don't want to surprise anybody. We don't want to kind of do this in a very collaborative way. So I promise I'll be on the program as soon as I have something to share. Okay, good, because I want to hear it. And I want you to bring it right here to us because, you know,

2:02we're here at the New York Stock Exchange. We've had you so many times. So break the news here in the meantime. You know, I heard you have a white council partnership. So this is exciting. Tell us more about that. Yeah, so this is all kind of in line with the strategy that we have, which is we want to be deeper and a price partners like White Castle. This is a legendary brand that are operating in many of the locations that we are in and as we expand our footprint, we can work with more of their franchises. So this just made a lot of sense. It's just been part of the strategy to go from, you know, local merchants all the way to major brands. And so do you expect to have more of that? I mean, that must be in your lineup, right? I mean, I would expect that by next year, you would have at least a handful of names we know that you're working closely with because we think about autonomous robot delivery and Uber Eats even, right? That's right. Yeah. I mean, look, we have Uber Eats, we announced the DoorDash last year.

3:03That basically gives us access to 80% of the food delivery market in the US. And then we are bringing the brands one by one, we've announced Shake Shack in the past. There's quite a few so far. These are relationships that take a little bit of time. And keep in mind that we only just got to the scale of like thousands of robots that makes it, you know, viable for them to want to invest into this. So I think you're going to see more and more of these kind of partnerships down the line. Do you feel at this point that demand for your robots is exceeding the supply? Is that sort of where we are right now? Because you sort of can't make the robots fast enough? How do you quantify that? Yeah. Yeah, you know, we know how much what percentage of the deliveries out there are within that distance that we can cover. And there's a lot of interest because the robots are quite efficient. They're more cost-effective, they're more reliable. It's, I do actually believe that for the foreseeable future, we will be supply constraints with robots. Even if we had all the robots we wanted to deploy, you have to be, you know, very incremental as you're launching in cities and not overwhelm them.

4:08So I think there's going to be some constraint on the supply of robots, which I actually think is a good thing. It's interesting because I remember asking you, and so we won't waste time on this, but I asked you, like, are you concerned that people sort of attack these things or try and break them open to get their crave for the eats, goodies? But you said that's really has not been an issue. And I'm glad to hear that. Is that still the case? Yeah, that continues to be the case. Robots are generally very, very received. There's a lot of positive reactions by folks. I wouldn't say there are no, you know, issues. Oh, it's just this part of doing business. It's just a very small percentage. Honestly, I get asked this question more than I have to deal with this situation. So people, I think, by and large are much, much better nicer to robots than we give them credit for. So when you boosted the revenue guidance, you know, obviously folks like that, the stock's up 8% here. What do you think will be the supporter for that? Well, look, we have brought a lot of new robots online,

5:09so that's going to help our growth. But on top of that, what was new is we did an acquisition of a robotics company called Delegion Robotics. They make effectively, they deliver robots for hospitals. And there was a lot of synergy where they can use the technology that we have developed at much bigger scale to scale their operation in hospitals. There's a big shortage of nursing in this country, and we can actually support nurses letting them spend more time at the bedside of patients rather than moving supplies and medication around. So there are already in 25 hospitals with about 100 robots, and this can scale quite a bit, and we see a lot of opportunities there. There is so much technology here. I think about, you know, you're in the hospitals, you're delivering the food, you're getting everybody's addresses. You know, I can't imagine the proprietary data that you are building there at Serve Robotics. Tell me about the tech side of this. Is it AI? Is it certain chips? What are we talking about? Because this is a whole other world.

6:11Oh, absolutely. I mean, if you follow the autonomous mobility space, these are basically small autonomous vehicles that have the same kind of LiDAR technology, same Nvidia chips insights, same kind of AI and autonomy. They're largely doing everything by themselves. They get support from humans when they don't know what to do, but they buy and large are kind of operating autonomously. And the amount of AI in these robots is staggering. There's a lot of these new models now coming into support, the robot's behavior, and they're just getting smarter and smarter every day. One of the things I love about this new acquisition we have is we are also going to get a new type of data, this indoor hospital environments that we can feed into the same models to make the models overall smarter and better. Yeah, I think about that. And then with all the names and addresses and things like that, you have, I mean, you must have incredible cyber security, right? So you have AI. You said the advancements of AI to run these autonomous vehicles. I'm sure you know where every single one is and how much it's being charged and how fast it's

7:14going. And I'm sure you have data on every single, how many are there, by the way? How many robots? You have 2,000 robots right now operating and 100 hospital robots. And how many do you hope to get to in how many years, let's say, from 2,000 to what? Yeah, I think in the next couple of years there's going to be thousands more robots that are going to be brought online. And so at this point now cyber security too, you must have incredible cyber security team. Yeah, security is super important. We obviously have public company and the robots are out on the streets. Everything is encrypted. Everything is very protected. So that we make sure the data that we collect is safe and secure. And again, we have obligations as a public company. So we have to be very, very attentive to this. This is a great partnership with White Castle, your acquisition here of Delish and Robots. I mean, it's just amazing what you've been doing, Ali. I hope you have continued success.

8:15You're going to go from 2,000 to thousands more of the robots. I remember when you were here. And I think each one has a name, which I think is pretty cool. Yeah. And so I think that's a lot of fun. And probably people are pining to get one named after them. In the meantime, you have a robot named Nicole. Oh, you do? You have a Nicole. I like that. That's beautiful. I was going to ask, but, you know, I was a little shy. It's like having a boat named after you. Ali, thank you. I love that. But I think it's fantastic. And really, you're in sort of a category by yourself. I haven't really seen any stiff competition for you, right? Final quick thought. Yeah. Look, I think we are really setting the industry and creating the category right now. So it's a good place to be. Yeah. All right. Well, congratulations on a beat on the quarter, on the fourth quarter, and a raised outlook. Alika Shawnee, talk to you soon. CEO, Sirp Robotics. Thank you.