EMERYVILLE — Covariant, an AI Robotics company, has raised an additional $75 million in Series C funds, bringing its total funding to $222 million. Returning investors Radical Ventures and Index Ventures co-led the round, which also saw additional funding from returning investors Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Amplify Partners. The round also welcomed new investors Gates Frontier Holdings, AIX Ventures, and Northgate Capital.
Founded in 2017, Covariant provides AI-powered automation solutions for warehouses. With offices in North America and Europe, Covariant has customers in 15 countries and nearly 300 robots powered by the Covariant Brain: a universal AI Robotics platform that enables robots to interact with and learn from their dynamic environments. Covariant offers a broad portfolio of AI-powered robotic picking applications, including order sortation, item induction, good-to-person order picking, kitting, and depalletization. Robots can autonomously pick virtually any SKU or item on Day One in industries spanning apparel, health and beauty, pharmaceuticals, logistics, and general merchandise.
“The leading companies have turned to AI Robotics to automate their most manual operations in order to decrease labor costs, increase throughput, and control profitability,” said Peter Chen, Chief Executive Officer, Covariant. “The past year for Covariant has been incredible with 6x growth in 2022 – and we are just getting started. This infusion of new capital allows us to scale even faster, ensuring more retailers can automate more parts of their fulfillment networks to remove manual bottlenecks, handle fluctuating demand, and better prepare for ever-changing business needs.”
Since its initial Series C in 2021, Covariant has taken its AI platform – the Covariant Brain – and successfully applied it to a broad set of piece-picking and case-picking applications that represent today’s manual warehouse operations. In less than two years, the company’s product portfolio has grown to include order sortation, item induction, good-to-person order picking, kitting, and depalletization solutions – all powered by a unified AI platform. By leveraging the first foundation model for robotics, retailers, 3PLs, and warehouse integration providers are able to leverage the same AI platform to power a variety of robotic systems regardless of use case, facility type, or location. Connected robots learn as a fleet – enabling operational improvements to automatically propagate across customers’ networks. Read more about Covariant’s growing number of customer deployments – including Radial, Inc.’s recently announced deployment of 12 AI-powered robotic putwalls.
“Covariant has proven it’s the world’s leading AI Robotics company, with AI enabling the successful deployment of robots at scale to secure global supply chains. That helps brands improve consumer trust, retailer confidence, and profitability, even in a time of economic uncertainty,” said Jordan Jacobs, Managing Partner of Radical Ventures.
Mike Volpi, Partner at Index Ventures, believes Covariant maintains a strong competitive advantage amidst an increasingly compelling market: “Many companies are trying to break into the AI Robotics space, but Covariant has been making significant progress for years now. I’m confident that their team, which represents the best minds in AI, and their approach of deploying a unified AI platform are shaping the future of automation, and look forward to the additional progress they’ll make in the years ahead.”
