Uber exits Serve Robotics as companies diverge on scaling

2 min read•Aug 13, 2026•

Uber has sold its entire stake in Serve Robotics, an autonomous delivery robot company, first reported by TechCrunch. The sale comes as the companies have started to diverge on the business side, with differing views on scaling the shared autonomous fleet; Serve did not expect that it would make sense to renew the partnership when it expires in early 2027.

The exit had been in motion for at least a year. Regulatory filings show Uber reduced its stake in 2025, but the final selloff surprised Serve, which learned about it once it was officially disclosed, according to a source familiar with the events.

Serve began as Postmates X, the robotics division of Postmates, which Uber acquired in 2020 for $2.65 billion. A year later, the division spun out as an independent company called Serve Robotics, taking the name of the autonomous sidewalk delivery bot that Postmates X developed and piloted.

Uber backed Serve and entered a partnership with the company in 2022. The companies expanded that partnership in May 2023 to deploy up to 2,000 of Serve’s sidewalk bots onto Uber’s app in multiple markets in the United States.

At Serve’s August 6 second-quarter earnings call, co-founder and CEO Ali Kashani said delivery volume through Uber grew for 17 consecutive quarters, from the first quarter of 2022 through the first quarter of this year. The trend reversed in Q2 because of lower-than-expected robot utilization.

Kashani also said the companies had differing views about the operating model for scaling the shared autonomous fleet, including fleet coordination and merchant integration. During the same time frame, Serve’s deliveries with another food delivery partner grew nearly 50% in a single quarter.

Uber’s Q2 reversal and Serve’s nearly 50% increase in deliveries with another food delivery partner sit alongside the companies’ differing views on scaling the shared autonomous fleet. Kashani said Serve did not expect that it would make sense to renew the partnership agreement when it expires in early 2027.

Uber has partnered with or invested in more than 30 autonomous vehicle technology companies over the past several years.

Aug 31, 2026

Meta agrees to teen limits in settlement costing up to $17B

Meta has reached a settlement with attorneys general from 47 states over allegations that it illegally manipulated children’s attention, first reported by Newyorker. The agreement could cost the company up to $17 billion and would change how Facebook and Instagram handle teen access through age verification, daily limits and nighttime restrictions.

Meta did not acknowledge wrongdoing. The Oakland trial turned on whether Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects providers from liability for user-posted content, should also shield the algorithms that shape what users see; the plaintiffs argued that it should not.

The states presented evidence that senior executives, intent on maximizing the company’s growth, repeatedly set aside concerns about what Meta’s products were doing to its youngest users. A former Meta engineer testified that the chance of a teen encountering violent or graphic content was between a hundred and four hundred times higher than what the company acknowledged publicly.

Meta also spent more than two billion dollars on legal defense in the second quarter of 2026 alone.

Under the agreement, Facebook and Instagram will remove the like count on posts, do more to verify that users are at least thirteen years old, limit service to two hours a day for teenagers and restrict service entirely for those users during nighttime hours.

The settlement was quickly compared with the tobacco lawsuits of the nineties. But Meta is a trillion-dollar company increasingly invested in artificial intelligence, and the agreement applies to only a single facet of its sprawling operations. The deal places a striking financial cost alongside product changes focused on teen users.

New technologies are being disseminated ever more quickly, while the machinery of politics and law delivers accountability intermittently and at a painstaking crawl. It took more than a decade of worrying about how teenagers used Facebook and Instagram for a legal settlement to enforce a change in Meta’s behavior.

Florida’s attorney general, James Uthmeier, stayed away from the lawsuit, arguing that it did not go far enough. After the settlement was announced, he said, “We’ll see them at trial.”