Covariant
Emeryville AI robotics company behind RFM-1, a robotics foundation model for warehouse picking, whose founders moved to Amazon in 2024
Covariant was founded in 2017 by AI researchers and roboticists from UC Berkeley and OpenAI and builds AI that lets robots pick, sort and handle goods in warehouses and distribution centres. In March 2024 the Emeryville, California company introduced RFM-1, an 8-billion-parameter robotics foundation model trained on text, images, video, robot actions and physical measurements, and said it had deployed a large fleet of warehouse robots at dozens of customers worldwide. It raised an $80 million Series C led by Index Ventures in July 2021 and a further $75 million of Series C funding led by Index Ventures and Radical Ventures in April 2023, which Index said brought total funding to $222 million. In August 2024 Amazon said co-founders Pieter Abbeel, Peter Chen and Rocky Duan and about a quarter of Covariant's staff were joining it, that it had taken a non-exclusive licence to Covariant's robotic foundation models, and that Covariant would keep serving its customers.
- Latest funding
- $75M
- Total funding
- $155M
- Latest valuation
- —
- Founded
- 2017
- Country
- United States
- Apr 4, 2023Series C extension$75M
- Jul 27, 2021Series C$80M