Covariant

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A Berkeley-linked warehouse-picking AI company that released RFM-1, with its core team absorbed by Amazon in 2024.

Covariant was founded in Emeryville, California in 2017 by Pieter Abbeel, Peter Chen, Rocky Duan, and Tianhao Zhang. Abbeel heads Berkeley's Robot Learning Lab, and the other three were his students; Abbeel, Chen, and Duan had also previously done research together at OpenAI. Its product, Covariant Brain, is AI software for warehouse picking arms, using imitation learning and reinforcement learning to let a robot arm grasp a wide variety of goods out of cluttered bins. In March 2024, it used data accumulated from deployments to release the robot foundation model RFM-1. The company raised about $222 million in total funding, valued at around $625 million in 2023. In August 2024, Amazon obtained a non-exclusive license to its technology and brought on founders Abbeel, Chen, and Duan along with roughly a quarter of its staff, a so-called 'reverse acquihire'; reports say the company has seen little activity since.

ExampleA robot arm running Covariant Brain picks items one by one out of mixed bins in an e-commerce warehouse and places them on a conveyor belt.

Related: RFM-1 · Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research · Amazon Frontier AI & Robotics · Bin Picking · Order Picking · Foundation Model
Sources: Covariant (company) - Wikipedia
As of: 2025