Fauna has built Sprout, a humanoid robot designed as a testing platform for robotics researchers and developers.
Tech giant Amazon has acquired Fauna Robotics, a New York-based humanoid robotics developer, for an undisclosed amount.
Fauna Robotics has developed a 42-inch tall humanoid robot called Sprout that can interact with people, walk, grip items and dance. The company has also included a developer platform with the robot, which allows researchers and scientists to build applications for the device.
The acquisition was first reported by Bloomberg, which verified the deal through an Amazon spokesperson. While the acquisition was first revealed yesterday (24 March), sources told Bloomberg that the deal was completed last week.
As part of the acquisition, Fauna – and its team of roughly 50 employees – will join Amazon’s Personal Robotics Group and the company will continue to deploy Sprout to outside researchers. While the start-up will keep its name, it will now be referred to as ‘Fauna, an Amazon company’, according to Bloomberg.
“Together with Amazon’s robotics expertise and decades of experience earning customer trust in the home through our retail and devices businesses, we’re looking forward to inventing new ways to make our customers’ lives better and easier,” an Amazon spokesperson told Bloomberg.
Fauna was established in 2024 by Josh Merel, a former Meta and Google DeepMind researcher, and Rob Cochran, former head of product at CTRL-Labs, a neural interface tech company that was acquired by Meta in 2019 and integrated into Facebook Reality Labs.
Fauna first launched the $50,000 robot out of stealth in January, available to researchers, educators and commercial developers. The robot has been designed to operate in “shared human spaces”, according to Fauna.
A major component of the machine is its application as a testing platform for robotics researchers and developers.
Fauna stated that Sprout is equipped with a number of developer functions such as modular AI architecture that allows robotics teams to use their own AI models anywhere in the system, trained motor control policies, and built-in mapping and localisation capabilities.
The robot has been built with the 64GB Nvidia Jetson AGX Orin, a small AI supercomputer designed for robotics, autonomous machines, medical devices and other forms of embedded computing at the edge.
Amazon’s purchase of Fauna hasn’t been the tech giant’s only robotics news this month.
Last week, the e-commerce company acquired Rivr, a Zurich-based autonomous robotics start-up known for its stair-climbing delivery robot.
These acquisitions come after Amazon announced layoffs in its own robotics division at the start of March. Cuts in the division followed Amazon halting its ‘Blue Jay’ warehouse robotics projects less than six months after launching – Blue Jay was a multi-armed robot designed to sort and move packages.
However, despite the hurdles, Amazon’s robotics division has been considerably successful, having deployed Amazon’s one millionth robot in operations last June. At the same time, the company also launched a new generative AI foundation model designed to make its robot fleet 10pc more efficient.
The robotics cuts were revealed roughly five weeks after Amazon announced company-wide layoffs of around 16,000 workers.
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