| Covariant | |
| Type: | Private |
| Location City: | Emeryville, California |
Covariant (formerly Embodied Intelligence) is an American artificial intelligence and robotics technology company. It is headquartered in Emeryville, California.[1]
The company was founded in 2017, under the name Embodied Intelligence,[2] by Pieter Abbeel, Peter Chen, Rocky Duan, and Tianhao Zhang.[3] Chen serves as CEO, Abbeel as president and chief scientist, and Duan as chief technology officer.[1] Since 2008, Abbeel has been director of the Robot Learning Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also a professor.[4] Chen, Duan, and Zhang are his former students at the university.[1] Abbeel, Chen and Duan worked together as researchers with OpenAI, and Zhang was formerly a researcher with Microsoft.[5]
Their purpose in starting the company was to bring an advanced level of robotic automation to factories and warehouses,[5] by building software to enable existing robot hardware to handle a wider range of tasks through a hybrid system of imitation learning and reinforcement learning.[6]
Building upon their research at Berkeley, the founders spent more than two years designing the Covariant Brain, AI-driven software that powers a robotic arm, enabling it to perform labor in a warehouse.[7] In 2018, the company began collecting data from 30 variations of robot arms in warehouses around the world, all of which ran using the Covariant Brain.[8] The company has since built up a database of billions of units of real-world robotics information.[8]
In February 2020, it was announced that industrial robotics maker ABB would be partnering with Covariant to create robots for warehouses.[9] Shortly after, automation company Knapp announced they would use Covariant's AI-for-robotics system, the Covariant Brain, at a warehouse it operates for German electrical supplies wholesaler Obeta.[3] [7] In 2023, logistics provider Radial implemented the Covariant Brain for robotic order sortation,[10] and German e-commerce retailer Otto Group announced the integration of Covariant's technology for item induction.[11]
On March 11, 2024, Covariant announced the launch of RFM-1 (Robotics Foundation Model 1), described as a robotics foundation model giving robots a human-like ability to reason and understand its environment.[12] The model is trained on text, images, videos, robot actions, and a range of numerical sensor readings captured by warehouse robots running the Covariant Brain.[13] [14]
The technology enables robots to learn how to manipulate objects, through the use of deep learning and reinforcement learning.[3] Covariant's offerings include Covariant Brain-powered goods-to-person picking, kitting, depalletization, item induction, and order sortation.[10] Their technology enables robot arms to pick and sort items from bins at rates exceeding human performance.[15]
At its founding, the company was backed by $7 million in funding from Amplify Partners and other investors.[5] On May 6, 2020, Covariant announced it had raised $40 million in a Series B funding round led by Index Ventures, after having raised $20 million in a series A round.[15] On July 27, 2021, Covariant raised $80 million in Series C funding,[16] and on April 4, 2023, the company raised an additional $75 million, bringing its total funding to $222 million.[17]