Covariant raises $75M for robotic picking technology

Covariant raised another $75 million in its Series C funding round. The company announced the first part of its series C round, totaling $80 million, in 2021. It has now raised $222 million since its founding.
Radical Ventures and Index Ventures, both returning investors in the company, co-led the round. The most recent round also included participation from other returning investors Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Amplify partners, and new investors Gates Frontier Holdings, AIX Ventures and Northgate Capital.
Since its founding in 2017, Covariant has focused on developing the Covariant Brain, which the company called a Universal AI platform. Pre-trained on millions of picks from Covariant robots in warehouses around the world, the Covariant Brain enables robots to autonomously pick many SKUs. Covariant plans to use the funding to ensure its platform will allow retail and logistics providers to deploy robotic picking quickly.
“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 Covariant CEO Peter Chen. “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 last funding announcement in 2021, the company has applied Covaraint Brian to a broad set of piece-picking and case-picking applications, including order sortation, item induction, good-to-person order picking, knitting and depalletization. With the platform, connected robots learn as a fleet, enabling operational improvements to automatically propagate across customers’ networks.
“Many companies are trying to break into the AI robotics space, but Covariant has been making significant progress for years now,” said Mike Volpi, partner at Index Ventures. “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.”