Bear Robotics
Last reviewed
Sources
40 citations
Review status
Source-backed
Revision
v3 · 4,300 words
Improve this article
Add missing citations, update stale details, or suggest a clearer explanation.
Suggest edit
CtrlK
Last reviewed
Sources
40 citations
Review status
Source-backed
Revision
v3 · 4,300 words
Add missing citations, update stale details, or suggest a clearer explanation.
Bear Robotics, Inc. is an American robotics company, founded in 2017 in Redwood City, California, by former Google software engineer John Ha, that designs and operates autonomous service robots for the hospitality, food service, senior care, and warehouse industries; its Servi indoor delivery robots run food, bus tables, and ferry drinks across restaurants, hotels, casinos, and corporate dining rooms, and the company reported more than 16,000 robots deployed worldwide by June 2026. [1][37] Bear Robotics helped popularize the modern category of restaurant service robots and is widely considered one of the global leaders in commercial indoor autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), alongside Chinese competitors such as Pudu Robotics and Keenon Robotics.
Bear Robotics raised funding from a group of high-profile investors including SoftBank, LG Electronics, IMM Investment, Cleveland Avenue, Lotte Group, and Smilegate. In January 2025, LG Electronics exercised a call option to acquire a controlling 51 percent stake in the company, effectively making Bear Robotics an LG subsidiary while keeping the founding management team in place. [4][8] The deal was reported to value the startup at roughly 600 million United States dollars, and it positions Bear Robotics as the technology core of LG's broader push into commercial, industrial, and home robots, which LG markets under the LG CLOi brand. [4][8] In June 2026, Bear Robotics announced its own first acquisition, agreeing to buy the British manipulation-robotics startup Kinisi Robotics to extend its platform from moving objects to picking and handling them. [37]
The company traces its origin to founder and chief executive officer John Ha's experience as both an engineer and an accidental restaurant operator. Ha holds a Bachelor of Science in computer science and engineering from Seoul National University and a Doctor of Philosophy in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin. He spent more than fifteen years working in software, including stints at Intel and a long tenure at Google as a senior software engineer and technical lead, before he purchased the Kang Nam Tofu House, a Korean restaurant in Milpitas, California, as a side project. [1]
Running the restaurant gave Ha a firsthand view of how physically punishing front-of-house work can be. Servers spent hours each shift walking the dining room with heavy trays, returning to the kitchen for refills, and bussing dirty dishes back to the dish pit. Convinced that an autonomous indoor robot could shoulder the most exhausting parts of the job, Ha founded Bear Robotics in May 2017 in Redwood City, California, recruiting engineers from the San Francisco Bay Area robotics talent pool. [38] Recalling the round of funding that scaled the company, Ha said: "I thought there must be a way to automate some of these repetitive tasks without losing what makes a restaurant great." [6]
Bear Robotics' first commercial product was an autonomous food runner originally branded Penny. The robot debuted publicly at the 2018 National Restaurant Association show in Chicago, where it drew significant attention as one of the first credible attempts to deploy a fully autonomous indoor delivery robot in a real dining room rather than as a novelty animatronic. [38] Penny used self-driving navigation adapted from outdoor autonomous-vehicle research, but tuned for the tight, dynamic environments of restaurants, where chairs move, customers cross paths unexpectedly, and floor layouts change between lunch and dinner service.
Following early pilots, Bear Robotics rebranded the platform as Servi as part of a partnership with SoftBank Robotics, expanding distribution in the United States, Japan, and South Korea. [18][19]
In January 2020, Bear Robotics raised a 32 million United States dollar Series A round led by SoftBank, with participation from LINE Ventures Corporation, Lotte Accelerator, Vela Partners, DSC Investment, and Smilegate. The deal was reported by TechCrunch, Yahoo Finance, and Nation's Restaurant News. [1][17] The financing brought Bear Robotics into SoftBank's growing portfolio of commercial robotics bets and laid the groundwork for a manufacturing and distribution partnership with SoftBank Robotics, which began bringing the platform to Japanese restaurants later that year as the country wrestled with a long-running labor shortage in food service. [5]
The second-generation Servi platform officially launched in late 2020. It introduced a swappable tray system, larger payload capacity, and more refined navigation than the original Penny prototypes. [15] The launch coincided with the global COVID-19 pandemic, which accelerated restaurant interest in contactless service and automation. Severe staffing shortages, rising wages, and persistent quit rates across the hospitality sector pushed many operators to test mobile robots as a way to retain human servers and divert them away from the most exhausting tasks. By January 2022, the Servi fleet had collectively traveled more than 247,500 miles, prompting the company to declare that "Servi has driven the distance to the moon." [38]
In March 2022, Bear Robotics closed an 81 million United States dollar Series B round led by IMM Investment, with continued participation from Cleveland Avenue (the venture firm founded by former McDonald's chief executive officer Don Thompson) and existing investors. [2][6] The round, which brought total disclosed funding to 117 million United States dollars, was widely covered by TechCrunch, Reuters, Restaurant Dive, Restaurant Business, and Business Wire. [2][10][11][12] At the time of the announcement, the company reported that its fleet had collectively made roughly 28 million deliveries across more than 335,000 miles of indoor travel and 9,000 hours of operation. [6][10] Chief operating officer Juan Higueros described the raise as "a key milestone for us to accelerate our product roadmap and expand our go-to-market initiatives." [10]
In March 2024, Bear Robotics announced a 60 million United States dollar Series C round led by LG Electronics. The deal gave LG an initial 21 percent equity stake along with a call option to acquire up to an additional 30 percent. [3][8] TechCrunch and The Robot Report described the financing as part of LG's broader strategy to merge software-driven robotics expertise with its existing CLOi commercial robot lineup. [3][10]
On January 22, 2025, LG Electronics' board of directors voted to exercise the call option from the Series C agreement, taking a controlling 51 percent stake in Bear Robotics and effectively making it an LG subsidiary. [8][10] Multiple outlets, including TechCrunch, PR Newswire, and The Robot Report, reported that the transaction implied a valuation of around 600 million United States dollars for Bear Robotics, with a South Korean outlet estimating the additional stake at roughly 180 million United States dollars. [4][8][10] CEO John Ha and the existing leadership team stayed in their roles to preserve continuity and to lead integration with LG's CLOi commercial robot business. [8] LG chief strategy officer Lee Sam-soo said the move "underscores our dedication to positioning robots as a pivotal growth engine for the company, reflecting our belief in their inevitable role in the future," while LG chief executive officer William Cho framed robots as "a certain future" at CES 2025. [4][8]
On June 22, 2026, Bear Robotics announced an agreement to acquire Kinisi Robotics, a Bristol, United Kingdom manipulation-robotics startup, in the company's first acquisition. [37] Kinisi brings the KR1 humanoid platform for picking, sorting, and handling objects, proprietary vision-language-action and robot foundation models, an in-house gripper design, a low-cost data-capture glove, and a European engineering and operations footprint. [37] Bear positioned the deal as adding the manipulation capabilities its delivery-focused fleet had lacked, turning the platform into an integrated, multi-robot "Physical AI" automation system rather than a set of separate products. John Ha said, "Most companies are trying to get from a pilot to a product; we're expanding from a deployed commercial fleet into full Physical AI automation," while Kinisi CEO Brennand Pierce said, "Together we're not building one humanoid in isolation; we're completing an integrated, multi-robot automation platform." [37]
Bear Robotics' product line spans hospitality service robots in the Servi family and industrial autonomous mobile robots in the Carti family, all sharing a common core software stack and cloud platform but differing in form factor, payload, and intended use case. [21][22]
| Model | First introduced | Form factor | Payload | Battery life | Typical use cases |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Penny | 2018 (debut) | First-generation tray robot | Limited; pre-production | Several hours per charge | Initial pilots in independent restaurants |
| Servi | 2020 (commercial launch) | Mid-size three-shelf or tray-and-bus-tub robot | Approximately 66 pounds (about 30 kilograms) | Roughly 12 hours of work per 4-hour charge | Restaurants, ghost kitchens, casual dining chains |
| Servi Mini | 2022 (introduced as smaller variant) | Compact, narrower chassis | Reduced versus Servi, optimized for drinks and small orders | Multiple shifts per charge | Bars, cocktail lounges, drink running, tight floor plans |
| Servi Plus | 2023 (introduced as larger flagship) | Larger chassis, taller frame | Approximately 88 pounds (about 40 kilograms) across up to four trays or four standard bus tubs | Roughly 8 to 12 hours per charge | High-volume restaurants, hotels, casinos, banquets |
| Servi Q | 2026 (introduced) | Compact, narrow chassis co-developed with SoftBank Robotics | Optimized for narrow aisles and high-traffic venues | Multiple shifts per charge | Tight spaces, narrow aisles, high-traffic hospitality |
| Servi Clean | 2026 (introduced) | Service-and-cleaning robot | Cleaning payload | Multiple shifts per charge | Commercial floor cleaning and bussing |
| Carti 100 | 2024 (launch) | Compact industrial AMR with tray or conveyor shelves | Light-to-mid payload | Multiple shifts per charge | Warehouses, manufacturing, intralogistics |
| Carti Low-Profile | 2026 (showcased) | Heavy-duty low-profile AMR | 400 to 1,500 kilograms | Multiple shifts per charge | Manufacturing floors, distribution centers |
Servi is the standard model and the workhorse of the Bear Robotics fleet. Its modular shelving lets operators configure the robot with three flat shelves for trays, two shelves plus a bus tub for combined runs and bussing, or other configurations to match their service style. Operators interact with Servi through a touchscreen on the top of the unit and can also send the robot to numbered tables via a tablet at the kitchen pass. The robot integrates with point-of-sale (POS) systems so that it can be summoned automatically when a ticket prints.
Servi Mini is a smaller, narrower variant designed for environments where space is at a premium, including bars, cocktail lounges, and tightly packed dining rooms. Its compact footprint helps it weave between barstools and corridors that the larger Servi cannot easily traverse. Servi Mini is positioned for drink running, light bussing, and venues where the average load per trip is small but the trip count is high. The compact niche is now served by Servi Q, introduced in 2026 and described by the company as "the most compact and versatile robot in the Servi family," co-developed with SoftBank Robotics and purpose-built for the tight spaces, narrow aisles, and high-traffic environments that had kept many hospitality venues from adopting autonomous service. [39]
Servi Plus is Bear Robotics' flagship high-capacity model, formally announced in 2023 and refined throughout 2024. It can carry over 16 entrees, up to 88 pounds across up to four extra-large trays or four standard bus tubs, and incorporates a refined liquid-delivery algorithm that lets it move open glasses of water, soup bowls, and similar liquids without spilling. [22] The model won an iF Design Award in 2024, recognized for its industrial design and ergonomics. [7] Servi Plus is targeted at high-volume environments such as hotels, casino floors, large banquet operations, senior living facilities, and corporate dining halls operated by large food service contractors.
Bear Robotics has broadened beyond food running. Servi Clean, launched in 2026, extends the platform into commercial floor cleaning, and Servi Lift adds compatibility with elevators, automatic doors, and third-party Android apps for multi-floor hospitality buildings. [38] The Carti family targets industrial logistics: the compact Carti 100, launched in 2024 with configurable tray or conveyor shelves for light-to-mid payloads, and the Carti Low-Profile series, showcased at Automate 2026, which extends payload capacity to between 400 and 1,500 kilograms for manufacturing floors and distribution centers. [40]
Bear Robotics' technology stack combines indoor SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) navigation, multi-sensor perception, a cloud-based fleet management platform, and integrations with restaurant-industry software such as POS and kitchen display systems. [21]
Servi robots use a combination of two-dimensional and three-dimensional LiDAR sensors, RGB-D depth cameras, and ultrasonic sensors to build and continuously update a map of the dining room. The SLAM software fuses these inputs to localize the robot inside its map at runtime while also incorporating new obstacles, such as moved chairs, customers walking past, or rolling carts, in real time. The navigation stack plans paths around these dynamic obstacles, slows the robot when crowds gather near it, and reroutes around blocked corridors.
Unlike many warehouse AMRs, Servi is designed to operate without floor markers, magnetic tape, or external infrastructure. Instead, an operator drives the robot around the venue once during initial setup, capturing a base map that the robot then refines on its own through ongoing operation. This makes installation relatively quick compared with older fixed-route restaurant conveyors and helps the platform adapt to seasonal layout changes such as patio expansions or holiday decor.
Bear Robotics' fleet management platform is branded Bear Universe. It allows owners and corporate operators to view live robot status across one venue or many, manage maps, generate analytics on trips, miles, hours, and meals delivered, and remotely diagnose hardware and software issues. [21] The company states that the platform can resolve a large majority of field issues remotely.
Bear Robotics integrates Servi with point-of-sale (POS) systems and kitchen display systems (KDS), so that when a ticket is fired, the robot can automatically be assigned to deliver the relevant tray to the correct table number.
The Servi platform was co-developed for manufacturing scale with SoftBank Robotics following the 2020 Series A. [18][19] Engineering services firm OLogic in Sunnyvale, California has publicly described its role in the early electromechanical design and prototyping of both Servi and Servi Mini. After the LG acquisition Bear Robotics also gains access to LG Electronics' substantial global manufacturing footprint. [8]
Bear Robotics has raised more than 175 million United States dollars in disclosed equity financing across multiple rounds, with investors that include some of the largest names in technology, media, and food-service venture capital. [26] The table below summarizes the major rounds reported by Crunchbase, PitchBook, and the contemporary tech press.
| Round | Date | Amount (USD) | Lead investor(s) | Notable participants |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | 2017 to 2018 | Undisclosed early backing | Various angels and seed funds | Bay Area angel investors |
| Series A | January 2020 | 32 million | SoftBank | LINE Ventures, Lotte Accelerator, Vela Partners, DSC Investment, Smilegate |
| Series B | March 2022 | 81 million | IMM Investment | Cleveland Avenue, existing investors |
| Series C | March 2024 | 60 million | LG Electronics | Existing investors; 21 percent stake plus option for up to 30 percent more |
| Strategic acquisition | January 2025 | Call option exercised | LG Electronics | LG took 51 percent controlling stake; reported valuation around 600 million |
Bear Robotics' robots have been deployed across thousands of customer sites in multiple countries, with particularly heavy concentration in the United States, South Korea, Japan, and Singapore; the company reported a worldwide installed base of more than 16,000 robots by June 2026. [37] The company describes its addressable market as restaurants, casual and full-service chains, ghost kitchens, hotels, casinos, senior living and assisted living communities, corporate dining rooms operated by large food service contractors, and entertainment venues.
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 2018 | Penny prototype debuted at the National Restaurant Association show in Chicago |
| 2020 | Servi platform commercially launched following Series A; SoftBank Robotics begins distributing in Japan |
| 2021 | Late-2021 deployment of Servi at a pilot batch of around 10 Chili's restaurants, marking Bear Robotics' first major casual dining chain |
| 2022 | Chili's, owned by Brinker International, expands its Bear Robotics deployment to dozens of additional locations across multiple US states; Bear Robotics reports its fleet has made roughly 28 million deliveries across about 335,000 miles |
| 2023 | Bear Robotics expands to additional senior living, hotel, and casino customers; Servi Plus formally introduced |
| 2024 | Servi Plus wins iF Design Award; LG-led Series C closes; Carti 100 industrial AMR launched; Servi deployed at 15 Denny's locations across the United States East and West coasts |
| 2025 | LG completes its majority acquisition; Bear Robotics positioned as the AI software core of LG's CLOi commercial robot business |
| 2026 | Servi Q and Servi Clean introduced; Carti Low-Profile showcased at Automate 2026; Bear Robotics agrees to acquire Kinisi Robotics; installed base surpasses 16,000 robots |
The company and contemporary trade press have publicly disclosed deployments with Chili's (Brinker International), Denny's, Marriott hotels, Compass Group (the world's largest contract food service company), and PepsiCo. [14][33][34] Bear Robotics has also worked with Google's corporate dining program. Coverage by Restaurant Business, Restaurant Dive, IoT World Today, and The Business Journal describes specific store-level rollouts at these brands. [11][12][14][33]
Bear Robotics primarily sells Servi through a robot-as-a-service (RaaS) subscription model, in which restaurant operators pay a monthly fee that bundles the hardware, software, fleet management, remote monitoring, updates, and routine maintenance. Public reporting from Restaurant Business has cited Servi pricing of roughly 999 United States dollars per robot per month for typical configurations. [12] This subscription approach lowers the upfront capital cost compared to outright purchase. Channel partners including RobotLAB and Performance Food Service also resell and finance Servi units to small and mid-size operators. [23]
Bear Robotics' commercial growth has been closely tied to chronic labor shortages in the hospitality sector. The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics has documented a quit rate in accommodation and food services that, in some periods, exceeded 6 percent per month, more than twice the national average. [35] By taking on physically taxing tasks like food running and bussing, Servi is positioned as a tool that helps restaurants retain human servers by letting them focus on guest interaction, upselling, and customer recovery rather than walking laps to the dish pit.
The global indoor service robot market for hospitality is dominated by a handful of large players, mostly headquartered in either California or southern China.
| Company | Headquarters | Flagship hospitality robot | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pudu Robotics (Pudu Technology) | Shenzhen, China | BellaBot, KettyBot, PuduBot, HolaBot, D7 (industrial AMR) | Cat-themed BellaBot is one of the most globally recognizable restaurant robots; broad product range from dining to industrial AMRs |
| Keenon Robotics | Shanghai, China | DinerBot T10 series, T8, T6 | According to IDC market data, Keenon held the largest share of the global delivery robot market in 2024 with roughly 29.8 percent share [28] |
| OrionStar | Beijing, China | Lucki delivery robot, AI receptionist robots | Backed by Cheetah Mobile; competes in both food running and reception roles |
| Richtech Robotics | Las Vegas, Nevada, United States | Matradee, ADAM (robotic bartender) | Publicly listed on Nasdaq; targets restaurants, casinos, and hotels |
| Pangolin Robot | Suzhou, China | Suzhou Pangolin delivery robots | Long-standing supplier listed in industry reports as a recurring competitor |
Bear Robotics is generally positioned as the leading United States-headquartered player in the category, while its largest global competitors by unit volume are based in mainland China. SoftBank Asia analyses cited in trade press have noted that Chinese competitors such as Keenon enjoy a significantly lower manufacturing cost base, which has translated into aggressive pricing and rapid international expansion. [28]
Bear Robotics' Servi Plus won an iF Design Award 2024 for its industrial design and form factor, an award announced in April 2024 by Business Wire. [7] The company also won a National Restaurant Association Kitchen Innovations Award in 2019. [38] Bear Robotics has been featured by major business and technology outlets including TechCrunch, Reuters, Forbes, The Robot Report, Restaurant Business, Restaurant Dive, PYMNTS, Nation's Restaurant News, IoT World Today, Robotics 24/7, Automated Warehouse, and Tech Times. CEO John Ha is a frequent keynote speaker at industry events on the future of indoor service robots and the integration of AI with hospitality operations.
Bear Robotics is led by founder and chief executive officer John Ha. The company is headquartered in Redwood City, California, with additional offices in Dallas, Texas, and a strong engineering presence in South Korea; the 2026 Kinisi acquisition adds a Bristol, United Kingdom engineering team. [37] Following the LG acquisition, Bear Robotics operates as a majority-owned subsidiary of LG Electronics while retaining its existing brand, product roadmap, and management structure. [8]