C

Covariant

Application

Developed robotics foundation models for warehouse-robot perception and manipulation until an August 2024 deal gave Amazon a non-exclusive licence to that technology and brought over its three co-founders plus about a quarter of its staff; its own site now shows only a copyright line, and a whistleblower complaint filed with the FTC, DOJ and SEC in January 2025 describes the remaining company as a shell kept running only to collect a final licensing payment.

Partner of Amazon

Total funding$222M

Valuation—

Employees—

Founded2017

HeadquartersBerkeley, USA

StatusAbsorbed

Related companies 0

No company in the directory shares a product capability with this one at the level this rail requires, so it lists nobody rather than filling itself with companies that merely sit in the same category. That is a gap in our product coverage, not a claim that this company has no peers.

Sources

Total funding

Press release · Jul 2021

Covariant's $80M Series C announcement (PRNewswire, 2021-07); combined with its disclosed $40M Series B and a 2023 follow-on, the cumulative total is $222M.

Employees

Checked — none published

Checked 2026-08-27 and no citable figure found. Four sweeps were run and all came back empty for this company: (1) its own /about, /about-us, /company, /careers, /jobs and /team pages, pattern-matched for a self-published headcount; (2) stockanalysis.com's private-company page, which footnotes each figure to its source; (3) its Forbes company profile, which states a headcount and the month it is as of; (4) a targeted web search. Everything the search returned was a LinkedIn-scraping aggregator, and those disagree with each other by wide margins and cite nothing, so they are not used here. The field is null rather than carrying the round guess it held before.

Founded

Wikipedia · 11 Sep 2026

Infobox: "Founded 2017; 9 years ago (2017)".

Status

News reporting · 21 Jan 2026

Amazon's own 2024-08-30 announcement (https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-covariant-ai-robots) states the deal as a non-exclusive licence to Covariant's robotics foundation models, with co-founders Pieter Abbeel, Peter Chen and Rocky Duan and about a quarter of Covariant's staff joining Amazon, and says Covariant "will continue to serve its dozens of customers" -- no equity changed hands, which is why relations.json's own note (2026-08-28) used partner_of rather than an acquired edge, and that edge is correct and left unchanged. What has moved since that announcement is Covariant's own observable state: a whistleblower complaint filed with the FTC, DOJ and SEC in January 2025 (first reported by the Washington Post, 2025-01-18, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/01/18/amazon-antitrust-ai-whistleblower/, paywalled -- not read directly) alleges the deal was structured so Covariant "not only could exist -- it must exist" only long enough to collect a final $20M licensing payment a year after closing. Hard Reset Media's 2026-01-21 follow-up, read directly, quotes the same whistleblower (a former Covariant employee, on video) describing the Emeryville headquarters as emptied out within months of the deal closing, robot hardware sold off or donated, staff down to roughly 20 people (mostly overseas), two of the remaining senior overseas staff having since also left, Covariant's social media and press page unchanged since the announcement, and business partners going silent when asked about the arrangement. CNBC's 2025-08-19 piece on 'zombie' acquihire deals across the industry names Covariant as one of them (search-result corroboration only; article itself returned 403 and was not read directly). None of this is a statement from Covariant or Amazon -- both have gone quiet rather than confirmed a wind-down -- so it rests on the whistleblower's account as reported by three independent outlets plus a direct fetch of the dead site, not on company disclosure. status moves from active to absorbed: org-status.json's acquired term was used first as the closest available word, but its own definition requires a purchase, and no equity changed hands here -- absorbed was minted to say what actually happened (staff and technology moved to Amazon through a licence and an acquihire) without asserting a sale that did not occur.

Description

Official documentation · 10 Sep 2026

covariant.ai re-fetched directly (not summarized) and still returns exactly 47 characters of visible text and zero links -- "Covariant ©2026 Covariant. All rights reserved." -- the same finding recorded earlier, on 2026-09-06. "Universal AI for robots" and any Amazon-licensing description text have no reachable source on the company's own site and are not used.

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