Amazon acquires Fauna Robotics and its approachable humanoid Sprout

Amazon has acquired Fauna Robotics, a two-year-old New York startup whose Sprout robot is a 50-pound, 3.5-foot bipedal machine designed to stand next to a child. The deal closed last week and brings the robot into Amazon's portfolio less than two months after its launch to research and development partners. Terms were not disclosed. Amazon confirmed the acquisition on Tuesday, according to a report by Bloomberg that cited people familiar with the matter. It is the company's second robotics acquisition this month. Fauna will operate as Fauna Robotics, an Amazon company, and its staff will remain in New York. Fauna was founded in 2024 by Rob Cochran and Josh Merel, two engineers whose paths crossed at Meta. Cochran previously led product at CTRL-labs, which Meta acquired in 2019, and Merel came from Google DeepMind. The roughly 50-person team includes veterans from Meta, Google DeepMind, and Amazon, and the company raised 16.6 million dollars in total funding before the acquisition. Sprout can walk, pick up light objects, express emotion through articulated eyebrows and LED facial displays, and navigate autonomously using an SDK that lets developers build applications within minutes. It is priced at 50,000 dollars and positioned as a developer platform for researchers, educators, and corporate labs. Early customers included Disney, Boston Dynamics, UC San Diego, and NYU. For Amazon the move marks a shift from its earlier consumer robotics efforts, including the wheeled Astro robot launched in 2021 and a planned acquisition of iRobot that was abandoned in 2024.