Amazon is hiring three of the founders from Covariant, a Bay Area startup that develops AI software for robotic picking machines.
As part of the deal, announced late Friday just before the holiday weekend, Amazon will receive a non-exclusive license to Covariant’s AI models.
Covariant will continue operating, but the company’s co-founders — former OpenAI researchers Peter Chen, Pieter Abbeel, and Rocky Duan — along with other team members will join Amazon.
The deal structure is similar to what Amazon did in June when it hired the founders of Adept, a well-funded startup building AI agents that automate enterprise workflows. Amazon also struck a licensing deal with Adept.
Other tech giants are using a similar strategy to add AI heavyweights to their workforce, including Microsoft, which earlier this year hired Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder and former CEO of consumer chatbot startup Inflection AI, along with Inflection co-founder Karén Simonyan and other employees.
These deals are essentially “reverse acquihires,” said Alex Heath, deputy editor at The Verge, in a post in July, describing the combination of the hires and the licensing deal as an acquisition in disguise.
Regulators have been paying closer attention to AI deals between tech giants and smaller startups. Amazon has reportedly drawn questions from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission related to the Adept deal.
Semafor reported this month that Adept’s investors recouped their investment in the company, even though Adept was not acquired by Amazon. “Investors in Adept also aren’t happy about this outcome. They need big returns, not refunds,” wrote Semafor technology editor Reed Albergotti. “But it’s better than losing their entire investment, which could have happened under other circumstances.”
Emeryville, Calif.-based Covariant, founded in 2017, focuses on AI-powered robotics systems, based on a platform that it calls the “Covariant Brain.” It automates warehouse tasks including order picking and sortation, item induction, and depalletization.
In its marketing materials, Covariant likes to use one of Amazon’s signature phrases to tout the immediacy of its impact, saying its AI platform delivers value on “Day One.”
Covariant’s customers include healthcare supply manufacturer McKesson, German retail giant Otto Group, and Radial, an e-commerce fulfillment solution company.
Amazon has rolled out a series of warehouse robots of its own across its operations, seeking to automate the process of moving products and packages through its fulfillment and sortation centers.
Bloomberg last month reported on a potential deal between Covariant and Amazon, noting that it could help centralize Amazon’s fulfillment center automation robots through one platform.
The deal comes as Amazon faces growing scrutiny over the safety of its warehouse operations and continues to push to achieve faster delivery times.
A widely cited 2019 report by the Center for Investigative Journalism showed a higher injury rate at Amazon’s robotic fulfillment centers than at its older facilities at the time, indicating that human workers were struggling to keep up.
Amazon disputes this assertion. Numbers provided by the company to GeekWire last year indicated that recordable incident rates and lost-time incident rates were 15% and 18% lower, respectively, at Amazon Robotics sites than they were at its non-robotics sites in 2022.
“I want to eliminate the mundane, and the tedious, and the repetitive,” said Ty Brady, the chief technologist for Amazon Robotics in a 2023 interview with GeekWire. “I want to make things safer inside our fulfillment centers. I don’t want folks to have to lift heavy boxes and crouch down on their knees or reach over their shoulders. And if we can have robotic systems to do that, that’s a win for everybody.”
Covariant has raised $222 million in funding, including $75 million in a Series C round in April 2023, led by Radical Ventures and Index Ventures, and joined by Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Amplify Partners, Gates Frontier Holdings, AIX Ventures, and Northgate Capital. The round reportedly valued Covariant at $625 million.
Covariant has more than 160 employees, according to LinkedIn. Amazon said about 25% of the company’s workforce is joining the company’s Fulfillment Technologies & Robotics team.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
“Covariant’s models will help drive new ways to generalize how our robotic systems learn and provide dynamic opportunities for how we use automation to make our operations safer and better deliver for customers,” Amazon said in a blog post.
https://ift.tt/A2VtbGY August 31, 2024 at 03:32AM GeekWire
Post a Comment
0Comments