Fauna has built Sprout, a humanoid robot designed as an experiment for robotics researchers and developers.
Tech giant Amazon has bought Fauna Robotics, a New York-based developer of humanoid robotics, for an undisclosed amount.
Fauna Robotics has created a 42-inch humanoid robot called Sprout that can communicate with people, walk, grasp objects and dance. The company also introduced a robotic engineering platform, which allows researchers and scientists to create applications for the device.
The acquisition was first reported by Bloomberg, which confirmed the deal through an Amazon spokesperson. While the acquisition was first revealed yesterday (March 24), sources told Bloomberg that the deal was finalized last week.
As part of the acquisition, Fauna – and its team of nearly 50 employees – will join the Amazon Personal Robotics Group and the company will continue to ship Sprout to outside researchers. While the startup will keep its name, it will now be called ‘Fauna, an Amazon company’ according to Bloomberg.
“With Amazon’s robotics expertise and decades of experience building customers’ trust at home through our retail businesses and devices, we look forward to inventing new ways to make our customers’ lives better and easier,” an Amazon spokesperson told Bloomberg.
Fauna was founded in 2024 by Josh Merel, a former researcher at Meta and Google DeepMind, and Rob Cochran, former head of product at CTRL-Labs, a neural interface tech company that was acquired by Meta in 2019 and merged with Facebook Reality Labs.
The animals first introduced a $50,000 robot without artificial intelligence in January, which is available to researchers, educators and commercial developers. The robot is designed to work in “shared human environments” according to Fauna.
A big part of the machine is its use as a testing ground for researchers and robotics engineers.
Fauna said Sprout is equipped with a number of engineering features such as a modular AI architecture that allows robotics teams to use their AI models anywhere in the system, trained vehicle control policies, and built-in capabilities for mapping and localization.
The robot is built with a 64GB Nvidia Jetson AGX Orin, a small AI computer designed for robots, autonomous machines, medical devices and other types of embedded peripheral computing.
The purchase of Amazon Fauna wasn’t the only tech robot news this month.
Last week, the e-commerce company acquired Rivr, a Zurich-based autonomous robotics startup known for its stair delivery robot.
The acquisition comes after Amazon announced layoffs in its robotics division in early March. The downsizing of the robot division comes after Amazon halted its ‘Blue Jay’ warehouse project less than six months after its launch – Blue Jay was a multi-armed robot designed to sort and move packages.
However, despite the setbacks, Amazon’s robotics division has been a huge success, putting its millionth Amazon robot into operation last June. At the same time, the company also introduced a new AI-based model designed to make its robotic cars 10pc more efficient.
The robot cuts were revealed nearly five weeks after Amazon announced company-wide layoffs of nearly 16,000 workers.
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