Amazon Acquires Fauna Robotics, Its Second Robotics Deal This Month
Amazon has confirmed the acquisition of Fauna Robotics, a two-year-old New York-based startup building humanoid robots designed for homes, schools, and social spaces. The deal, first reported by Bloomberg, marks Amazon's entry into the consumer humanoid market and its second robotics acquisition in less than two weeks.
What Fauna Robotics Makes
Fauna's debut product is Sprout, a 42-inch tall bipedal robot priced at $50,000 that began shipping to select research and development partners in January. Founded by former Meta and Google engineers, Fauna designed Sprout to be approachable rather than industrial. The robot is padded in soft foam, minimizes pinch points, and is built to operate safely in environments shared with people and children.
Sprout is capable of walking, gripping objects, dancing, giving high fives, shaking hands, and holding back-and-forth conversations using natural voice interaction. It runs on Nvidia's Jetson Orin robotics platform, uses AI to maintain balance, and carries a swappable battery that lasts around three hours per charge. Early customers included Disney. The current version functions primarily as a developer platform, with researchers and scientists building their own applications on top of it rather than using it as a finished consumer product.
Why Amazon Made This Deal
Amazon's statement on the acquisition pointed directly to the consumer home as the target: “Together with Amazon's robotics expertise and decades of experience earning customer trust in the home through our retail and devices businesses, we're looking forward to inventing new ways to make our customers' lives better and easier.”
Fauna's roughly 50 employees, including its two co-founders Rob Cochran and Josh Merel, will join Amazon's Personal Robotics Group in New York. Fauna will continue operating as “Fauna, an Amazon company” and will keep deploying Sprout to outside researchers. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Amazon's track record in consumer robotics has been mixed. The company launched Astro, a home robot for security monitoring and remote care, in 2021, but the device has seen limited adoption and remains invitation-only. Amazon also canceled its planned acquisition of iRobot in 2024 following regulatory pushback from the European Union. Fauna represents a fresh attempt to establish a foothold in the home robotics category, this time through a humanoid form factor with a developer-first approach.
Amazon's Broader Robotics Push
The Fauna deal is the second robotics acquisition Amazon has confirmed this month. Last week, Amazon acquired Rivr, a Zurich-based startup that builds stair-climbing delivery robots designed to navigate from the street to a customer's front door. The two deals address different parts of Amazon's robotics strategy: Rivr targets the last-mile delivery problem, while Fauna targets the home environment.
Amazon has operated one of the largest robot fleets in the world for years, having deployed its one millionth robot across warehouse operations last June. Its robotics division also launched a generative AI foundation model designed to make its warehouse robot fleet 10% more efficient. The acquisitions of Rivr and Fauna extend that footprint beyond the warehouse and into delivery and the home.
The Competitive Context
The humanoid robot market is drawing in most major technology companies. Tesla, Figure AI, Apptronik, Agility Robotics, Boston Dynamics, and China-based Unitree are all developing humanoid robots, and Apple, Meta, and Google have each expressed interest in the space. Amazon's acquisition of Fauna puts it directly in that competitive field, though Sprout's consumer-friendly, developer-first positioning differs from the industrial and warehouse-focused direction most competitors are taking. Whether Amazon turns Sprout into a finished consumer product or uses Fauna's technology to build something new remains an open question.
