Amazon took on talent and technology from robotics startup Covariant to enhance its warehouse automation, an area critical to its core ecommerce business.
What’s new: Amazon announced an agreement to hire Covariant’s cofounders and other key personnel and license its models. Financial terms were not disclosed. (Disclosure: Andrew Ng is a member of Amazon’s board of directors.)
How it works: The new deal echoes Amazon’s previous not-quite acquisition of Adept as well as similar arrangements between other tech giants and startups.
- Amazon received a non-exclusive license to Covariant’s RFM-1, a model that enables robots to follow commands given as text or images, answer questions, and request further instructions. The deal will scale up Covariant’s installed base by several orders of magnitude: Covariant maintains hundreds of robots, while Amazon has over 750,000.
- Covariant CEO Peter Chen, CTO Rocky Duan, Chief Scientist Pieter Abbeel — all of whom are co-founders of the company — joined Amazon. Roughly a quarter of Covariant’s current staff moved to Amazon as well. The new hires will implement Covariant’s models in Amazon’s robots and work on fundamental AI research and human-robot interaction.
- Ted Stinson, previously Covariant’s COO, will lead the company as the new CEO alongside remaining co-founder Tianhao Zhang. Covariant will continue to serve existing customers in industries beyond ecommerce, including fulfillment and distribution, apparel, grocery, health and beauty, and pharmaceuticals, the company said.
Behind the news: Amazon has been working to acquire technical talent and technology for some time. In 2022, it announced that it would acquire iRobot, but the companies abandoned that plan earlier this year after EU regulators blocked the deal citing antitrust concerns. In October, it committed to invest as much as $4 billion in Anthropic in return for access to the startup’s technology. (UK regulatory authorities subsequently announced an antitrust probe into Amazon’s relationship with Anthropic.) In July, it signed a hire-and-license deal — similar to its agreement with Covariant — with agentic AI startup Adept.
Why it matters: Competition among AI giants continues to heat up. Amazon’s agreement with Covariant mirrors other deals in which a tech giant gained top talent and technology without formally acquiring a startup, including Microsoft’s arrangement with Inflection and Google’s deal with Character.AI. These developments highlight top tech companies’ race to secure their AI positions — and the fact that outright acquisitions invite regulatory scrutiny.
We’re thinking: Robotic foundation models that are trained on large amounts of unlabeled robotics data offer a promising way to quickly fine-tune robots to perform new tasks — potentially a major upgrade in warehouse logistics.