On a quiet street in North Vancouver, two delivery robots sit parked in a garage. They’re leftovers from a Pizza Hut pilot project—a reminder that, while Ali Kashani spends much of his time in Silicon Valley scaling one of the world’s largest autonomous robot fleets, Vancouver is still home.

“From is a vague word,” he tells me. “But if you ask me where’s home? It’s Vancouver. This is where my house is. This is where my family is.”

For Kashani, the answer is both literal and symbolic. He has built a company—Serve Robotics—that operates in Miami, Dallas, Los Angeles, and soon Atlanta. The business went public on NASDAQ last year, has raised roughly $300 million, and is on track to scale to 2,000 delivery robots by the end of 2025. Yet he speaks with equal conviction about moving back to Vancouver full-time next year.

Kashani was born in Tehran and left Iran at 17. Two years later, in 2004, he moved to Vancouver to attend UBC. Canada, he says, was “a unique place for being really welcoming to people who looked like me” in the years after 9/11.

At UBC, he studied computer engineering and later pursued a PhD in robotics and computer vision. His entrepreneurial spark had been lit much earlier. “When I was a teenager in Iran, my dad told me about Bill Gates—how he started computers in a garage and brought them to every home. I thought, what can I bring to every home? I decided it was robots. Which is kind of funny, because that’s exactly what I’m doing now.”

He helped launch Neurio Technology, a smart-home energy company acquired by Generac Power Systems. The exit gave him his first taste of success, but not before years of near-burnout. “By the time Neurio was sold, I was broke. My car broke down and I couldn’t pay to fix it. We had taken so many salary cuts just to survive.”

After Neurio, Kashani was invited to be an entrepreneur-in-residence at Pear Ventures in Silicon Valley. The experience embedded him in the Valley’s culture of iteration and networks. “When I wanted to spin out of Uber later, I made two phone calls and had a playbook from people who’d done dozens of spinouts. You can’t get that anywhere else.”

Soon after, he founded Lox, Inc., which was acquired by Postmates. That led him into the food delivery business at a pivotal moment. “2017 was the year everyone realized the economics of food delivery weren’t working. Scale wasn’t fixing it. That’s when all the companies—Uber, Amazon, Postmates—started looking seriously at autonomy. For Postmates, Serve was our bet on the future.”

When Uber acquired Postmates in 2020, Kashani convinced executives to let Serve spin out as an independent company. “If you’re building a platform like this, you need to work with everyone. If we stayed inside Uber, competitors would never work with us. And I wanted to protect Serve from belt-tightening. So I found investors, Uber said yes, and we spun out in 2021.”

Four years later, Serve has 400 robots in U.S. cities and is scaling to 2,000 by year’s end—making it one of the largest autonomous fleets in the world. “Waymo might have more robots than us, but they’ve got 100 times more money. We’re resource-constrained, but we’re still playing in that league. That’s something I’m really proud of.”

Serve went public on NASDAQ in 2023, via a Canadian-style reverse takeover. The timing was bold: they made the decision the day after Silicon Valley Bank collapsed. “VC was drying up. Everyone was wounded. We realized if we wanted capital to scale, it wasn’t going to come from venture. So we took a gamble. It was unusual for a company at our stage to go public, but it worked.”

The $300M raised has gone straight into growth: building robots, hiring senior leaders from companies like GoPro and GM’s BrightDrop, and expanding into new markets. Serve now employs north of 300 people.

Kashani believes Serve’s strength is in its complexity. “We’re not just a software company. We have AI and autonomy, we have hardware, and we have operations—running robots out in cities every day. It’s very hard to do all three, but that’s what makes the company defensible. Hardware is hard, but if you figure it out, it’s a way to make lasting companies.”

His optimism extends to AI more broadly. “We’ve literally turned sand into intelligence. And yet people wake up in the morning and say, ‘We don’t need any more intelligence.’ It makes no sense. Every major invention—from the printing press to the bicycle—was feared at first. AI is going to improve healthcare, quality of life, everything. It’s such a bummer that fear dominates the conversation. I don’t think enough people are as bullish and excited as I am.”

For Kashani, geography is both reality and aspiration. “If you’re in finance, you go to New York. If you’re an actor, you go to Hollywood. If you’re an entrepreneur, you go to Silicon Valley. That’s where the talent density is. That’s where the odds are better.”

But he also believes in coming back. “My advice to first-time founders is: go where you have the best odds. But my advice to Canadians in the U.S. is: come back. Canada is a really special place. I want to keep growing my roots here and help build the ecosystem.”

For now, that means shuttling between the Bay Area and North Vancouver, where those two retired delivery robots wait patiently in his garage. Silent, but not idle—they’re symbols of a future Kashani insists is both inevitable and deeply human.