In March, Covariant demonstrated a chat interface for its robot and said it had developed a foundation model for robotic grasping, meaning an algorithm designed to become more capable as it is fed more data.

In-depth Amazon coverage from the tech giant’s hometown, including e-commerce, AWS, Amazon Prime, Alexa, logistics, devices, and more.Covariant CEO Peter Chen. (Covariant Photo)Amazon is acquiring 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.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

Covariant Announces a Universal AI Platform for Robots Evan Ackerman | IEEE Spectrum "[On Monday, Covariant announced] RFM-1, which the company describes as a robotics foundation model that gives robots the 'human-like ability to reason.'