In 2012 Amazon quietly acquired a robotics startup called Kiva Systems, a move that dramatically improved the efficiency of e-commerce operations and launched a broader revolution in warehouse automation.
Last week, the e-commerce giant announced another deal that could prove just as important, agreeing to hire the founders of Covariant, a startup testing ways for AI to automate more than picking and processing a wide range of physical objects.
Covariant may have found it challenging to commercialize AI-inspired industrial robots given the high costs and fierce competition; the deal, in which Amazon will also license Covariant’s models and data, could lead to another revolution in e-commerce — one that could prove difficult for any competitor, given Amazon’s massive operational scale and data.
The deal is also an example of a major tech company acquiring core talent and expertise from an AI startup without actually buying the company outright. Amazon reached a similar deal with startup Adept in June. In March, Microsoft struck a deal with Inflection, and in August, Google hired the founders of Character AI.
Early on, Kiva developed a way to move products through warehouses by having squatting robots lift and carry stocked shelves to human pickers—a trick that meant workers no longer had to walk miles each day to find different items. Kiva’s mobile bots were similar to those used in manufacturing, and the company used smart algorithms to coordinate the movement of thousands of bots in the same physical space.
Amazon’s army of mobile robots has grown from around 10,000 in 2013. to 750,000 by 2023, and the sheer scale of the company’s operations meant it could ship millions of items faster and cheaper than anyone else.
The one job that remains stubbornly difficult to mechanize, however, is the physical handling of products. Adaptability is required to account for things like friction and slippage, and robots will inevitably encounter unfamiliar and awkward objects among Amazon’s vast inventory.
Covariant has spent the last few years developing AI algorithms with a more general ability to more reliably process a set of elements. The company was founded in 2020. by Pieter Abbeel, a professor at UC Berkeley who has done pioneering work applying machine learning to robotics, along with several of his students, including Peter Chen, who became Covariant’s CEO, and Rocky Duan, the company’s CTO. This week’s deal will see all three, along with several researchers at the startup, join Amazon.
