- AI robotics company Covariant recently announced that it raised $40 million in Series B funding
AI robotics company Covariant recently announced that it raised $40 million in Series B funding. This brings the company’s total funding to $67 million. This round of funding was led by Index Ventures and AI-focused Radical Ventures with participation from existing investor Amplify Partners and others.
With this round of funding, Covariant will accelerate partnerships, launch AI robotics in new industries, and grow its R&D and commercial teams,.
The global supply chain is facing unprecedented pressure for delivering orders quickly and efficiently while also keeping workers safe. And automation is essential for meeting these challenges.
Even though repetitive and predictable tasks such as the movement of goods have been successfully automated, the complex and unpredictable tasks that require hands like picking and unloading have not. And traditional automation cannot handle the constant change and infinite variability of these tasks. Plus automating them requires advanced artificial intelligence that can understand, learn, and adapt.
Launched in 2017, Covariant is building the Covariant Brain — which is universal AI that enables robots to see, reason, and act autonomously in the real world.
Covariant robots learn general abilities like 3D perception, physical affordances of objects, few-shot learning, and real-time motion planning — which gives them the intelligence to learn how to manipulate new objects they have never seen before in environments.
“When we founded Covariant, our goal was to make AI Robotics work autonomously in the real world,” said Pieter Abbeel, Co-Founder, President, and Chief Scientist at covariant.ai. “Having reached that milestone, we see a huge benefit in expanding our universal AI to new use cases, customer environments and industries.”
This funding comes on the heels of the company hitting a few major milestones. After emerging from stealth, Covariant invested in strategic partnerships to accelerate the deployment of robotic stations to customers. And in February, Covariant announced a partnership with leading industrial robotics supplier ABB. A couple of months ago, Covariant also joined forces with Knapp.
“As the coronavirus crisis has exposed serious frailty in the global supply chain, we’re seeing more demand than ever for our AI Robotics solutions,” explained Peter Xi Chen, Co-founder and CEO at covariant.ai. “Our customers are eager to invest in AI and scale it across their supply chains to meet growing demands and more stringent requirements. This latest funding round, along with our recent partnerships, will allow us to scale quickly across multiple industries.”
In connection with the investment, Index Ventures partner Mike Volpi is joining Covariant’s board.
“We’ve been blown away by Covariant’s team of world-class AI researchers and roboticists and the universal AI they’ve built,” commented Volpi. “Covariant’s AI, powered by deep learning, will unlock the next wave of robots that learn. We are excited to be a part of Covariant’s journey to become the next great AI company.”
