Tech
Serve Robotics and Wing to trial robot-to-drone delivery in Dallas
Drones and sidewalk delivery robots promise to make last-mile delivery cheaper and more efficient, but they both have their limitations. Drones have trouble touching down in dense urban areas, and sidewalk robots tap out after a couple of miles. Uber-backed Serve Robotics and Alphabet’s Wing are betting that combining forces might just create the ultimate automated last-mile delivery service.
And they’re set to try out their robot-to-drone delivery relay in Dallas in the coming months.
Serve’s CEO Ali Kashani told TechCrunch the partnership has the potential to expand the company’s delivery area, which is currently limited to around two miles. It also could allow merchants to tap into drone delivery without making any changes to their facilities or workflow.
Here’s how it’ll work.
A select number of customer orders will be picked up by a Serve bot from a single restaurant or store’s curbside and carted a few blocks away. The bots will then pass the food baton to a single Wing “AutoLoader,” where it can be picked up by a Wing drone and flown to customers as far as six miles away.
“If you look at delivery the way it is today, it’s always multimodal,” Kashani said. “Drones and robots have a very non-overlapping profile, where usually robots make sense in denser urban environments … whereas drones have limitations in those environments. You need some kind of real estate to show up in front of a restaurant and grab an item [with a drone.] So this is where the two really add up nicely together because being able to offer customers and merchants a fuller kind of solution where all deliveries, whether they’re short or long distance, can be automated.”
Kashani also noted that the robot drop-offs would be asynchronous with the drone pick-ups. He said the robot will drop the package onto the AutoLoader and the drone can grab it anytime after that.
Details of the trial are scant. Neither Serve nor Wing would share how many of their bots or drones would be involved, where the AutoLoaders and other assisting infrastructure would be located, or which merchant would be the first to try out this experiment. Oddly, when asked, Wing told TechCrunch that it would be an existing merchant partner of Serve, and Serve told TechCrunch it would be an existing merchant partner of Wing.
Serve delivers for around 300 restaurants in Los Angeles via the Uber Eats and 7-Eleven platforms, and recently started delivering for Shake Shack. Wing works with Walmart in Dallas, and has done a drone delivery pilot with DoorDash and Wendy’s in Virginia.
A spokesperson for Wing said the partnership would not be with Walmart.
Sometimes, these pilots progress into an actual commercial enterprise. For now, this could be more experimentation as Serve and Wing figure out whether there’s a real business case for drone and bot delivery.
The partnership comes nearly six months after Serve went public via a reverse merger with gross proceeds of $40 million. The company also recently raised another $20 million in a private placement and warrant exercise.
Serve’s CFO Brian Read told TechCrunch the company has enough cash on hand to get it towards its goals of putting an additional 250 bots on the streets of Los Angeles in the first quarter of 2025, and up to 2,000 bots in multiple U.S. cities by the end of next year through a contract with Uber Eats.
Tech
Revolut eyes valuation of up to $200B in eventual IPO
British neobank Revolut seems to be eyeing a major valuation bump when it eventually goes public. The company is targeting a market cap between $150 billion and $200 billion in an initial public offering, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday, citing anonymous investor sources.
The fintech giant, which secured a full banking license in the United Kingdom in March after years of waiting, was most recently valued at $75 billion, up from $45 billion in 2024, in a secondary share sale that made it one of Europe’s most valuable private tech companies.
Revolut’s co-founder and CEO, Nik Storonsky, last week said that the company’s IPO was at least “two years away,” according to Bloomberg.
According to PitchBook and the Financial Times, the company is working on another secondary share sale, scheduled for the second half of 2026, that would value it at more than $100 billion.
As of November 2025, the company had raised a total of $5.89 billion, according to PitchBook. Revolut reported revenue of $6 billion in the financial year ended December 31, 2025, up from $4 billion in 2024. The company’s net profit grew to $1.7 billion, up from $1 billion in 2024, and counted 68.3 million retail customers at the end of 2025.
Revolut declined to comment.
Founded in 2015, Revolut offers a range of services spanning multi-currency accounts, payment and transfer services, crypto products, insurance, and more. The neobank has been pouring truckloads of cash into expanding its operations internationally, and recently applied for a banking license in the United States.
Besides the U.K., Revolut has a banking license in the European Union, and it operates in Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, Brazil, and the U.S. Revolut launched operations in India last October, is about to start operating in Colombia this year, and has received a banking license in Mexico.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Tech
Amazon taps Sweden’s Einride for its electric big rigs
Einride is adding 75 of its electric heavy duty trucks to Amazon’s Relay freight network as part of a deal that gives the Swedish startup a toehold in the e-commerce giant’s operations. Einride will also provide charging infrastructure across five locations in the United States, under the agreement announced Tuesday.
Amazon isn’t buying or operating the electric trucks. Instead, Einride will own and manage (using its own Saga AI software) the trucks, which can be used by drivers in Amazon’s Relay freight network. Relay, launched in 2017, is an app that truck drivers can use to book hauling gigs with Amazon.
Einride CEO Roozbeh Charli, who took over as chief nearly a year ago, said working with Amazon is a powerful validation of the startup’s technology and strategic vision.
“By deploying our intelligent platform within one of the world’s most sophisticated logistics networks, we are accelerating growth, while continuing to build industry-leading operational expertise,” he said in a statement.
Einride has gained attention and investment for its two-pronged approach to freight. The company has developed and now operates a fleet of about 200 heavy-duty electric trucks for companies like Heineken, PepsiCo, and Carlsberg Sweden in Europe, North America, and the UAE. It has also developed autonomous pod-like trucks, which stand out for their cab-less design.
The agreement with Amazon doesn’t include the autonomous pods.
Einride has landed this agreement at a critical time: The startup is finalizing a merger with blank-check company Legato Merger Corp. and is expected to go public soon.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco, CA
|
October 13-15, 2026
While the agreement might not carry the same weight for Amazon, which has a market cap of $2.7 trillion, it does contribute to its low-carbon goals. Amazon has said it wants to reach net-zero carbon emissions across its operations by 2040.
“This rollout is an important step forward in addressing one of the toughest challenges we face in decarbonizing our transportation network — electrifying heavy-duty trucking,” an Amazon spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “We’re excited to continue to collaborate with Einride and learn from these operations as the trucks hit the road.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Tech
YouTube expands its AI likeness detection technology to celebrities
YouTube is expanding its new “likeness detection” technology, which identifies AI-generated content, such as deepfakes, to people within the entertainment industry, the company announced on Tuesday.
The technology works similarly to YouTube’s existing Content ID system, which detects copyright-protected material in users’ uploaded videos, allowing rights owners to request removal or share in the video’s revenue.
Likeness detection does the same, but for simulated faces. The feature is meant to help protect creators and other public figures from having their identities used without their permission — a common problem for celebrities who find their likenesses have been used in scam advertisements.
The technology was first made available to a subset of YouTube creators in a pilot program last year before expanding more broadly to include politicians, government officials, and journalists this spring.
Now YouTube says the technology is being made available to those in the entertainment industry, including talent agencies, management companies, and the celebrities they represent. The company has support from major agencies like CAA, UTA, WME, and Untitled Management, which offered feedback on the new tool.
Use of the likeness detection tool does not require entertainers to have their own YouTube channels.
Instead, the feature scans for AI-generated content to detect visual matches of an enrolled participant’s face. Users can then choose to request removal of the video for privacy policy violations, submit a copyright removal request, or do nothing. YouTube notes that it won’t remove all content, as it permits parody and satire content under its rules.
In the future, the technology will support audio as well, the company says.
Related to this, YouTube has also been advocating for similar protections at a federal level, with its support for the NO FAKES Act in Washington, D.C. This would regulate the use of AI to create unauthorized re-creations of an individual’s voice and visual likeness.
The company hasn’t yet said how many removals of AI deepfakes have been managed by the tool so far, but noted in March that the amount of removals was still “very small.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
NASAs incredible new telescope will offer an atlas of the universe
400K MagSafe power banks recalled after fatal fire, the 10th power bank recall in a year
