Amazon buys Fauna Robotics
Amazon acquired New York startup Fauna Robotics, the maker of the “Sprout” kid‑sized humanoid, signaling a major move into consumer and social robots beyond warehouse automation. The buy folds Fauna’s ex‑Meta/Google engineering team into Amazon’s push to normalize robots in homes, schools and hospitality spaces. (bloomberg.com)
Fauna’s co‑founders are Rob Cochran (ex‑CTRL‑Labs/product roles) and Josh Merel (formerly at Meta/DeepMind), and the company was built by a team of roughly 50 engineers based in Manhattan’s Flatiron District. (automate.org) Sprout ships as a Creator Edition humanoid that stands 107 cm tall, weighs about 22.7 kg (50 lbs) and exposes 29 degrees of freedom for whole‑body articulation. (faunarobotics.com) The platform runs on an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin (64GB) and includes a ZED 2i stereo camera, multiple ToF sensors, a four‑mic array, an IMU and a swappable battery rated for roughly 3–3.5 hours of runtime. (humanoidroboticstechnology.com) Fauna priced Sprout at about $50,000 for the initial Creator Edition and listed early partners and research users including Disney, Boston Dynamics, UC San Diego and NYU. (cnbc.com) The company published a technical report describing Sprout’s whole‑body control stack, integrated grippers for manipulation, and a VR‑based teleoperation workflow aimed at accelerating embodied AI research. (arxiv.org) Fauna had raised venture backing reported at roughly $30 million from investors including Kleiner Perkins, Quiet Capital and Lux Capital, and the startup’s terms of sale were not publicly disclosed. (bloomberg.com) Fauna’s engineering group and founders are expected to join Amazon’s personal‑robotics effort in New York, adding a soft‑bodied, safety‑first humanoid platform to Amazon’s recent robotics purchases such as last week’s Rivr deal for last‑mile delivery robots. (therobotreport.com)
