Diligent Robotics
Last reviewed
Jun 4, 2026
Sources
18 citations
Review status
Source-backed
Revision
v1 · 1,875 words
Improve this article
Add missing citations, update stale details, or suggest a clearer explanation.
Suggest edit
CtrlK
Last reviewed
Jun 4, 2026
Sources
18 citations
Review status
Source-backed
Revision
v1 · 1,875 words
Add missing citations, update stale details, or suggest a clearer explanation.
Diligent Robotics is an American healthcare robotics company based in Austin, Texas, that builds Moxi, an autonomous mobile manipulation robot used by hospitals to run non-clinical fetch-and-delivery tasks. The company was founded in 2017 by two robotics researchers, Dr. Andrea Thomaz (chief executive officer) and Dr. Vivian Chu (chief technology officer), who met at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where Chu was a doctoral student co-advised by Thomaz. Moxi is positioned as a "socially intelligent" service robot: a wheeled, single-arm mobile manipulator with an expressive head and animated eyes, designed to operate alongside people in the unstructured corridors of working hospitals rather than as a bipedal humanoid robot. By late 2025 the company described its installed base as the largest deployed fleet of mobile manipulation robots working in human-centric environments, with more than 1.25 million autonomous deliveries completed across over 25 U.S. hospital facilities. In January 2026, sidewalk-delivery firm Serve Robotics announced an agreement to acquire Diligent and operate it as a subsidiary.
Diligent should not be confused with Diligent Corporation, an unrelated board-governance and GRC software company that operates the diligent.com domain.
Diligent Robotics is headquartered in Austin, Texas. Its mission is to relieve clinical staff of repetitive, non-patient-facing logistics so that nurses and other caregivers can spend more time on direct patient care. The company frames its niche as "social robotics" combined with mobile manipulation, meaning robots that can both move autonomously through a building and pick up and carry objects, while behaving in ways that people find legible and comfortable. Diligent describes Moxi as the first robot built specifically to combine social intelligence with mobile manipulation for healthcare staff.
| Person | Role | Background |
|---|---|---|
| Andrea Thomaz | Co-founder and CEO | B.S. in electrical and computer engineering, University of Texas (1999); Sc.M. and Ph.D. in EECS, MIT (2002, 2006). Joined Georgia Tech as a faculty member in 2007 and later became a tenured associate professor at UT Austin, where she directs the Socially Intelligent Machines Lab. Recognized in MIT Technology Review and on Popular Science's 2012 Brilliant 10 for work on socially intuitive machines. |
| Vivian Chu | Co-founder and CTO (later Chief Innovation Officer) | B.S. in electrical engineering and computer science, UC Berkeley (2009); M.S.E. in robotics, University of Pennsylvania (2013), where she worked in the Haptics Group of the GRASP Lab; Ph.D. in robotics, Georgia Tech, co-advised by Thomaz. Previously worked at the Honda Research Institute. |
Thomaz's academic research centers on human-robot interaction and on robots that learn new tasks from ordinary people in everyday settings, which became the intellectual foundation for Moxi's interactive, learn-from-staff design.
Moxi is Diligent's flagship product and only commercial robot. It is a mobile manipulator: a wheeled base carries a torso fitted with a single articulated arm and a parallel-jaw gripper, topped by a rounded head with stylized eyes that convey direction of attention and simple emotional cues. Moxi navigates on wheels rather than legs, so it is explicitly not a humanoid; the expressive face is part of its "social intelligence," intended to make the machine feel approachable to staff, patients, and visitors in busy corridors. The base houses lockable, differently sized drawers in which supplies, samples, or medications are secured during transport.
Moxi is an autonomous mobile robot that builds and uses a map of the hospital floor from onboard sensors, then plans routes through hallways, around beds and wheelchairs, and through human crowds. Its arm lets it interact with the physical environment to a degree most delivery robots cannot, including pressing buttons and using its hand to manipulate door mechanisms and call and ride elevators, which lets it move between floors without human help. Tasks are non-clinical and non-patient-facing: running patient supplies, delivering lab specimens, fetching items from central supply, distributing personal protective equipment, retrieving patient belongings, and delivering medications from the pharmacy. The company says a typical delivery takes roughly 20 to 26 minutes and that Moxi adapts its workflows to each site by learning from the team it works with. Diligent has cited operational impact figures including over 575,000 staff hours saved, more than 1.5 billion steps saved, and over 125,000 autonomous elevator rides across U.S. health systems as the fleet passed one million completed picks.
Moxi began as research trials. The robot debuted in pilot programs at Texas hospitals in September 2018, with early trials at sites including Texas Health Dallas and other Texas health systems. Between 2018 and 2019 Diligent partnered with several Texas health systems to run research trials and shape how Moxi fit into clinical workflows. Commercial deployments started in 2020. By the company's September 2023 Series C announcement, Diligent said Moxi was adopted across more than 20 health systems representing over 200 hospitals, and projected more than 100 robots at upward of 30 hospitals by the end of 2023. At the time it announced Moxi 2.0 in October 2025, the company reported the fleet had completed more than 1.25 million deliveries across over 25 hospital facilities, which it characterized as one of the largest real-world datasets of human-robot interaction. Reported and pilot customers over time have included Northwestern Medicine, ChristianaCare, Cedars-Sinai, Children's Hospital Los Angeles, Mary Washington Healthcare, MultiCare Health System, Rochester Regional Health, and NorthShore - Edward-Elmhurst Health, among others.
On October 28, 2025, Diligent unveiled Moxi 2.0, described as its next-generation platform built around modern AI from the ground up. The new robot keeps the original's expressive face but upgrades both hardware and software. Diligent says Moxi 2.0 carries roughly ten times the onboard compute of the first generation by moving to the NVIDIA IGX Thor module (based on NVIDIA's Blackwell architecture), up from earlier NVIDIA Jetson hardware. The software centerpiece is a proprietary "robot foundation model," an end-to-end AI model for navigation and manipulation that Diligent trained on its accumulated deployment data and that is meant to let the robot reason about, predict, and pre-emptively navigate around obstacles in crowded, dynamic spaces. The design was also reworked for manufacturability and fleet scaling, with changes such as improved service panels and handles. Diligent presented the platform in the context of NVIDIA's ecosystem and said first Moxi 2.0 units would begin deploying in the first half of 2026, with a stated goal of roughly doubling its hospital footprint each year and reaching thousands of robots by 2030. The company also signaled interest in adjacent human-centric settings such as senior living through the AARP AgeTech Collaborative.
Diligent raised capital across seed, Series A, Series B, and Series C rounds. Public reporting and the company's own announcements put cumulative funding at more than $100 million from investors including Tiger Global, Canaan, and True Ventures. Headline rounds are summarized below; some regulatory filings report individual tranches separately, so the figures here reflect the company's announced round totals.
| Round | Date announced | Amount | Lead investor | Notable participants |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | 2018 | Not disclosed | True Ventures (first investment Jan 2018) | Early institutional backers |
| Series A | March 2020 | $10 million | DNX Ventures | True Ventures, Ubiquity Ventures, Next Coast Ventures, E14 Fund, Promus Ventures, Grit Ventures |
| Series B | April 2022 | Over $30 million | Tiger Global | True Ventures, DNX Ventures, Ubiquity Ventures, E14 Fund, Next Coast Ventures, Boom Capital, Gaingels, Cedars-Sinai Health Ventures (new) |
| Series C | September 2023 | $25 million | Canaan | True Ventures, DNX Ventures, Next Coast Ventures, Northwestern Medicine Innovation (new strategic) |
The 2022 Series B brought cumulative funding to nearly $50 million and was earmarked for scaling production and deployments. The 2023 Series C, led by Canaan with Rich Boyle joining the board, was aimed at system-wide hospital expansions and tripling the company's market reach. Earlier backers and partners also include strategic healthcare investors such as the Cedars-Sinai Accelerator. The reported investor roster across rounds includes Tiger Global, Canaan, True Ventures, DNX Ventures, Ubiquity Ventures, Next Coast Ventures, E14 Fund, Promus Ventures, Grit Ventures, Boom Capital, Gaingels, and Founders Fund.
On January 31, 2026, Serve Robotics, the autonomous sidewalk-delivery company spun out of Uber, announced a definitive agreement to acquire Diligent Robotics. The transaction was valued at about $29 million in Serve common stock (subject to adjustment), with an additional earn-out of up to $5.3 million tied to performance milestones, and was expected to close in the first quarter of 2026. Serve framed the deal as an expansion of its "physical AI" and autonomy platform from outdoor sidewalks into indoor, human-centric environments such as hospitals. Under the agreement, Diligent was to continue operating as a subsidiary of Serve under the leadership of Andrea Thomaz. In its announcement Serve cited Diligent's deployment in more than 25 hospital facilities, more than 1.25 million completed autonomous deliveries, prior funding of more than $100 million, and per-site revenue of roughly $200,000 to $400,000 annually as evidence of a commercially proven indoor robotics business.