Moxi: a nurse’s helper with a million deliveries, unplugged at some hospitals

Moxi is a hospital logistics robot that carries supplies and samples so nurses don’t have to. Its maker reports more than a million deliveries, but some hospitals stopped using it, saying it was used too little for what it cost.

A robot with an arm that runs nurses’ errands

Diligent Robotics was founded in Austin, Texas, in 2017 by robotics researchers Andrea Thomaz and Vivian Chu. Moxi does not care for patients directly. It carries supplies, lab samples, medications and linens between wards, and nurses give it jobs by text or phone. It has an arm and gripper on a mobile base and LED eyes in its face. It stands about 5 ft tall and weighs about 300 lb. The company chose a soft, rounded form so that people would be comfortable having it around. In Thomaz’s words: “A robot needs to do something functional, be a utility, and provide value, but also be socially acceptable and something people want around.” Pilots ran at four Texas hospitals from 2018, and the first commercial deployments followed in 2020.

A million deliveries, and a $29 million sale

Cedars-Sinai brought in Moxi in 2021, and the company raised more than $30 million in 2022 and $25 million in 2023. In February 2025 it announced a million deliveries and more than 575,000 hours saved, both figures reported by the company. In January 2026 the sidewalk delivery company Serve Robotics announced it would buy Diligent for $29 million in stock plus an earn-out of up to $5.3 million. TechCrunch reported that Diligent had raised more than $75 million by then. In August 2026 the rollout of Moxi 2.0, with ten times the onboard computing power, began.

A delivery robot that needed an escort

Hospital managers quoted by the company said staff efficiency and morale rose. Independent reporting told a different story. MultiCare, a health system in Tacoma, Washington, deployed up to 14 robots from 2023, but Good Samaritan Hospital ended its use in July 2024 and Tacoma General in August 2025. Nurses said the robot got lost and could not ride elevators on its own, so someone had to walk with it. One nurse asked: “Why do we have the robot if we have a human with her all the time?” MultiCare said: “The cost didn’t justify their level of usage.” When Proof News contacted 14 hospitals that had deployed Moxi, five confirmed they were still running it.

A clear job it could not finish alone

Moxi did not stop for lack of a task, as Pepper did. Its job was clear. The question was whether it could do that job from start to finish by itself. Depending on what the building demanded, such as elevators and moving between floors, the same robot saved time in one hospital and added work for people in another. The company’s delivery count and the hospitals that switched it off need to be read together.

How many times does a person have to step in for this robot to finish its job?

What we haven’t confirmed