Amazon Robotics

Now, what's interesting is the company was basically created by Amazon accidentally.

That's kind of a hot take here, but the reason is Amazon had bought the warehouse robotics pioneer called Kiva Systems in 2012. and then amazon stopped selling the kiva systems to outside customers so the two founders they discussed this reportedly while commuting to ge healthcare and they were thinking so if amazon thinks warehouse robotics is so valuable that they want to keep it to themselves well there must be a huge market obviously they didn't want to explicitly copy kiva systems because the keeper robots mainly moved shelves horizontally but the idea for exotec was what if the robot itself could also climb vertically so this lets you take advantage of the height of a warehouse rather than limiting the storage to shelves that need to be transported on the floor level right And they built a prototype.

It was a very startup-ish prototype.

It didn't even have autonomous navigation.

But then, you know, to this conversation, I really have to contend with the fact that like, frankly, it hadn't really worked.

There was a number of companies who kind of had worked, like Kiva became Amazon Robotics, which is obviously very successful.

Amazon has deployed probably a million robots plus at this point.

Locust Robotics, I think, has crossed like 200 million bucks in recurring revenue, which is great.

In our case, we're sort of taking a lot of the world model constraints out because we're really constraining the problem into a factory environment.

And the next piece for us then comes down to play is to say, what else do we need to constrain next, right? Like my whole experience and own experience from Amazon Robotics has been really like constrain the problem so you have maximum leverage in applying automation.

So you're saying basically the diversity of the problems in the real world that robotics has to solve necessarily means that it will be a very diversified field and a very fragmented sector of models.

Is that the idea? Short

It's pretty complicated if you stop and think about it.

Amazon made this all visible to the public when they acquired a company called Kiva Systems and it popularized these orange robots that move entire shelves around the floor.

What those robots changed was not the act of picking, at least not at first.

They changed who had to travel.

What on earth is Amazon doing with 2 million next-gen GPUs?

They are building the infrastructure for Amazon Robotics.

This expansion is designed to support physical artificial intelligence across their warehouse facilities.

Physical AI.

CEO came from Ghost Autonomy.

And the other co-founder went to MIT and did work at Amazon Robotics.

really strong and they focus on you know the freight freight forwarder yeah that's a wedge and I think that's really smart because that's also an area where it's more overlooked and they were able to

what do

I'm guessing Amazon is in there somewhere.

Of course, Amazon bought a warehouse robotics company called Kiva back in 2012, and that gave them that famous mobile drive unit fleet.

But for actual picking, they've been slower.

They've been testing arms from companies like Covariant and others, but they haven't fully rolled them out.