Covariant

Covariant is an American artificial intelligence and robotics technology company founded in 2017 (originally as Embodied Intelligence) by Pieter Abbeel, Peter Chen, Rocky Duan, and Tianhao Zhang. Headquartered in Emeryville, California, the company builds AI software that enables existing robot hardware to perform a wider range of warehouse and logistics tasks. Its core product, the Covariant Brain, uses a hybrid of imitation learning and reinforcement learning to power robotic arms for tasks such as picking, sorting, and depalletizing. The company has raised a total of $222 million in funding from investors including Index Ventures, Radical Ventures, and Amplify Partners. In August 2024, Amazon entered into a non-exclusive license agreement with Covariant, hired 25% of its workforce, and brought its founders on board, a deal later reported to be worth $380 million plus a $20 million final licensing payment.

Covariant develops the Covariant Brain, AI-driven software that powers robotic arms in warehouses and logistics centers. The software enables robots to handle a wide range of manipulation tasks—including goods-to-person picking, kitting, depalletization, item induction, and order sortation—by learning from real-world data collected from robot arms deployed in warehouses globally. The system uses deep learning and reinforcement learning to allow robots to pick and sort items from bins at rates exceeding human performance. In 2024, Covariant introduced RFM-1 (Robotics Foundation Model 1), a robotics foundation model trained on text, images, videos, robot actions, and numerical sensor readings, giving robots a human-like ability to reason and understand their environment.