Amazon.com Inc. is hiring the three founders of Covariant, a well-funded startup that develops artificial intelligence software for warehouse robots.

The company announced the move late Friday. Pieter Abbeel, Peter Chen and Rocky Duan, who worked at OpenAI before launching Covariant, are moving to Amazon’s Fulfillment Technologies & Robotics Team. They will be joined by multiple engineers and researchers from Covariant who make up about a quarter of its workforce.

As part of the deal, Amazon will also license Covariant’s foundation AI models. The company said that the agreement is nonexclusive.

Amazon has deployed more than 750,000 robots in its fulfillment centers to process online shoppers’ orders more efficiently. Some of the company’s automation systems, such as Sequoia, comprise several robots that work together to perform multistep tasks. Others automate simpler chores such as checking parcels for packaging issues. Many of Amazon’s robots are powered by onboard AI algorithms. 

Covariant, officially embodied intelligence Inc., also uses machine learning to make warehouse robots more efficient. The company’s flagship offering is an AI platform called the Covariant Brain. It allows robots to perform picking, which is the process of retrieving the products ordered by online shoppers from warehouse shelves.

Historically, companies had to manually tailor their robots’ picking workflow to every single product in their warehouses. The Covariant Brain promises to reduce the need for manual programming. As a result, it decreases the amount of work involved in deploying warehouse robots and thereby cuts the associated costs.

Covariant has raised more than $200 million from investors since launching in 2021. Following a funding round last year, the company disclosed that customers have deployed more than 300 robots powered by its platform in their warehouses. Amazon said on Friday that Covariant will continue to support its “dozens of customers” and enhance its technology going forward. 

Its platform is powered partly by internally developed foundation models. The company detailed one such model, RFM-1, last year. It allows robots to automatically plan the optimal way of carrying out a given task and ask a human for help if necessary. Amazon will use the foundation models that it’s licensing from Covariant to enhance its automation technology. 

“Embedding Covariant’s AI technology into our existing robot fleet will make them more performant and create real world value for our customers,” said Joseph Quinlivan, vice president of Amazon Fulfillment Technologies & Robotics.

The deal is one of several recent transactions that saw tech giants hire key employees from AI startups and license their technology. Last month, Google LLC hired the founders of chatbot developer Character.AI Inc. and agreed to license its LLMs. Microsoft Corp. earlier inked a similar deal with Inflection AI Inc., a well-funded OpenAI competitor.

Photo: Covariant