Buying guide
Cartken Courier vs Serve Gen 3 in 2026
Comparing 2 humanoid robots across availability, pricing, capabilities, and verified deployments. Current as of 2026.
| Attribute | No image on file | No image on file |
|---|---|---|
| Manufacturer | Cartken | Serve Robotics |
| Form factor | sidewalk | sidewalk |
| Maturity | commercial | commercial |
| Availability | internal-onlyenterprise | internal-onlyenterprise |
| Price | Not announced | Not announced |
| Capability claims | — | — |
| Brain | — | — |
| Verified deployments | 1Cartken | 4 |
| Privacy practices | 6bystander-recording, cloud-upload, data-retention, third-party-sharing, location-tracking, data-deletion-control | 6bystander-recording, cloud-upload, data-retention, third-party-sharing, location-tracking, data-deletion-control |
| Sources on file | 7 | 29 |
Editorial summaries
Cartken Courier
Cartken (founded 2019 by ex-Google 'Bookbot' engineers; CEO Christian Bersch) makes the Cartken Courier (Model C), a six-wheeled sidewalk delivery bot (about 44 pounds and 1.5 cubic feet of payload, 3 to 6 mph), and is the hardware-sale-pivot archetype of the cohort, editorially distinct from Starship and Serve: where they operate their own fleets, Cartken pivoted toward selling vehicles to operator partners. Its partners include Mitsubishi, Uber Eats, and Melco, and its lineup adds a larger industrial Hauler (2025; 660 pounds / 300 kg) and an indoor Runner. It is operator-supervised, not driverless. It has raised about $22.5 million (468 Capital, Magna International, Shell Ventures, Mitsubishi Electric). Cap-flag: the roughly 100 Hauler vehicles cited in the Melco deployment is an aggregator-quoted figure pending direct Cartken or Melco disclosure. As a B2B hardware sale to operator partners, there is no consumer price.
Serve Gen 3
Serve Robotics (NASDAQ: SERV, via a 2023 SPAC merger; spun out of Postmates in 2021, where it began in 2017 as Postmates X) makes the Serve Gen 3, a third-generation autonomous sidewalk delivery robot (rolled out October 16, 2024) and the publicly-traded archetype of the cohort. Gen 3 roughly doubles top speed and range over Gen 2, halves manufacturing cost, and adds 5x onboard compute (NVIDIA Jetson Orin), Ouster digital lidar, and camera, ultrasonic, and GPS fusion. It is operator-supervised Level 4, remotely monitored from Serve's local operations centers with human oversight and takeover, not driverless. Its anchor commercial relationship is Uber Eats. Because Serve is public, its verification depth is unusual in the cohort: SEC quarterly filings. A key cap-flag from those filings: the fleet is about 2,000 robots built but only 812 daily-active (Q1 2026), across 44 cities in 14 US states (verified markets include Los Angeles, Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth, Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Chicago, and Alexandria, Virginia). As a B2B delivery service, there is no consumer price.
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