SERV's Restaurant Network Scales Up: Can It Drive a New Growth Cycle?

Serve Robotics, Inc. SERV is rapidly expanding its restaurant footprint, turning partner growth into a central pillar of its operating strategy. In the third quarter of 2025, the company reported that it delivers for over 3,600 restaurants, reflecting a 45% sequential increase and more than a ninefold expansion year over year. Management emphasized that this acceleration is not merely a function of geographic rollout but a structural driver of fleet utilization, autonomy improvement and economic leverage across its network.

This restaurant expansion is closely tied to SERV’s deepening integrations with Uber and DoorDash, which together serve more than 80% of the U.S. food delivery market. By operating across both platforms simultaneously, Serve Robotics robots can take on orders from either channel in real time, maximizing route density and eliminating idle time. Management highlighted that a robot completing a DoorDash delivery can accept an Uber order on its return path — an interoperability advantage that improves utilization and lowers cost per delivery as the fleet scales.

Restaurant growth is also accelerating through new national partnerships. Serve Robotics began delivering for Jersey Mike’s Subs during the quarter, adding to existing relationships with Shake Shack and Little Caesars. This mix of high-volume chains and neighborhood restaurants broadens Serve Robotics’ demand base, creating steady order flow across markets and dayparts. As the company enters new cities — from Miami to Chicago — each restaurant cluster adds unique real-world conditions to its data engine, strengthening the autonomy stack and improving model performance systemwide.

Management believes this growing restaurant network is emerging as a durable competitive advantage. With more than 1,000 robots deployed and on track to reach 2,000 by 2025-end, Serve Robotics is building what it describes as the first national autonomous delivery network. Every additional restaurant increases delivery density, every delivery produces valuable sensor data, and every data point sharpens the AI models that drive safety, reliability and speed.

With restaurant partnerships widening, platform integrations deepening and autonomy improving across new cities, Serve Robotics’ merchant coverage engine is shaping into a key catalyst for the company’s next growth cycle.

SERV’s Price Performance, Valuation & Estimates

Shares of Serve Robotics have risen 25.8% in the past three months compared with the industry’s growth of 0.9%. In the same time frame, other industry players like Vertiv Holdings Co VRT, BigBear.ai Holdings, Inc. BBAI and Leidos Holdings, Inc. LDOS have gained 35.8%, 38.7% and 2.9%, respectively.

SERV Three-Month Price Performance

SERV stock is currently trading at a premium. It is currently trading at a forward 12-month price-to-sales (P/S) multiple of 47.67, well above the industry average of 17.01. Then again, other industry players, such as Vertiv, BigBear.ai and Leidos have P/S ratios of 5.82, 16.80 and 1.34, respectively.

The Zacks Consensus Estimate for Serve Robotics’ 2026 loss per share has widened from $1.40 to $1.67 in the past 60 days.

The company is likely to report dismal earnings, with projections indicating a 9.9% fall in 2026. Conversely, industry players like Vertiv, BigBear.ai and Leidos are likely to witness growth of 26.3%, 72.8% and 4.7%, respectively, year over year in 2026 earnings.

SERV stock currently has a Zacks Rank #4 (Sell).

You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

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This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).

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