Covariant's robotic picking AI nabs another $75M
Summary
Im sure the startups comms people are thrilled that Im writing a follow-up a week later on the occasion of a new funding round.Regardless, $75 million is a hard number to ignore especially as the Series C extension brings the AI firms total raise up to $222 million. The round adds on to an $80 million Series C announced in July 2021.This investment allows us to further develop the Covariant Brain as a more capable foundation model and to apply the Covariant Brain to even more use cases across a wide variety of sectors, Chen tells TechCrunch. With eCommerce demand continuing to grow and supply chain resilience becoming more important, weve made tremendous progress with global retailers and logistics providers, and are looking forward to revealing more details on these partnerships soon.I was also treated to a demo of Covariants tech at the show last month. At the heart of the logistics play is the Covariant Brain, which is building a massive database of potential package sizes, shapes and materials based on real-world picks.In our conversation, Chen used generative AI/ChatGPT as an analogy. The approach before GPT is, for each use case, you train a specific AI to it, using a smaller subset of data.