Amazon hires three of the founders of AI robotics company Covariant, licenses its technology

Amazon announced late last week in a blog post (published August 30th) that it has hired three of Covariant’s founding executives, while also signing a non-exclusive license to use Covariant’s robotic foundation models.

According to the Amazon blog post, the deal will help accelerate Amazon's robotics innovations. The post explains that as part of the agreement, Pieter Abbeel, Peter Chen, Rocky Duan, and a group of research scientists and engineers who comprise around a quarter of Covariant’s current employees, will join Amazon’s Fulfillment Technologies & Robotics Team to help drive the development and implementation of Covariant’s technology within Amazon’s operations and continue to develop innovative AI solutions. Covariant will continue to serve its dozens of customers and build on Covariant’s technology that supports fulfillment and distribution center automation, the post added.

“We’re excited to welcome some of Covariant’s talented team to Amazon and look forward to building on this technology with them to deliver the next generation of robotics that will drive forward the state-of-the-art in automation,” said Joseph Quinlivan, Vice President, Amazon Fulfillment Technologies & Robotics. “With some of the smartest minds, we will advance fundamental research, marrying our rich expertise to unlock new ways for AI and robots to assist our operations employees. Imbedding Covariant’s AI technology into our existing robot fleet will make them more performant and create real world value for our customers.”

The value of the deal wasn't disclosed. Covariant also issued a blog post about the development, explaining that the non-exclusive deal will "optimize" its business position "so that we can continue inventing solutions for our customers’ most persistent and costly warehouse automation challenges."

Covariant was co-founded in 2017 by Abbeel, Chen, and Duan, as well as Tianhao Zhang, who remains with Covariant. According to Covariant's post, also from Aug. 30th, Zhang, along with Ted Stinson, will assume leadership of the company. Stinson, who is COO, will step into the CEO role. "Over the past seven years, Ted and Tianhao have been instrumental in driving Covariant’s commercial and technical strategies—creating a strong foundation for continued success as they lead Covariant into an exciting new phase of growth," the post stated.

Covariant added it will continue to enhance its Covariant Brain, the name for its robotics foundation models, which are used to enable warehouse pick and place automation solutions. The company's post added that since its founding, it has collaborated with over 50 customers and partners on projects to deploy hundreds of AI-powered robotic solutions.

"We remain dedicated to delivering the Covariant Brain into production environments across a broad set of global industries, including apparel, health and beauty, grocery, and pharmaceuticals," the post concluded.