Wednesday Jun 03, 2026

Ali Kashani, Serve Robotics

Ali Kashani is the co-founder and CEO of Serve Robotics, and he has done what almost no one in Robotics has: put robots on real streets in dozens of cities and made people love them. He is the youngest Iranian-born CEO on the Nasdaq, the youngest CEO of any robotics company on the exchange, growing revenue around 600 percent year over year and scaling from 100 robots to thousands in a single year.

We also get into the part most founders never put on a slide. Between spinning out of Uber and ringing the Nasdaq bell, Serve hit its last payroll ten times. Two of those times Ali made payroll out of his own mortgage.

Ali was born in Iran and left at 17. He did his robotics PhD at the University of British Columbia on fusing LiDAR and cameras, started an energy hardware company that nearly died and then sold

I co-hosted this one with a friend of the pod Brendan, Managing Director of AI and Partner at Human Agency.

Our News Letter : https://substack.com/@seondnewsletter

Ali Kashani Linkedin : https://www.linkedin.com/in/alikashani

Ardalan Javadi : https://www.linkedin.com/in/ardalanjam1369/

00:00:00 The youngest Iranian-born CEO on the Nasdaq

00:01:19 Why a public company beats a private one

00:02:47 The path to Serve: a robotics PhD and LiDAR

00:04:14 Fired, broke, and one step at a time

00:07:20 The dead company that came back

00:08:31 DARPA 2005 and the contrarian bet on LiDAR

00:12:45 Designing a robot people would forgive

00:16:04 Principle before perception