Amazon acquires Fauna Robotics, maker of the Sprout humanoid platform

Amazon has acquired Fauna Robotics, a New York-based humanoid robotics startup founded in 2024 by former Meta and Google engineers. Fauna's roughly 50 employees, including its founders Rob Cochran and Josh Merel, will join Amazon in New York. The company will continue operating as Fauna, an Amazon company, within Amazon's Personal Robotics Group. Financial terms were not disclosed.

The founders

Cochran previously served as head of product at CTRL-Labs, the neural interface company Meta acquired in 2019, where the work centred on decoding human movement intent from nerve signals before they reach muscle. Merel was a research scientist at Google DeepMind working on AI for physical systems. The pairing is directly relevant to what Fauna built. Cochran's CTRL-Labs work dealt with the hardest part of human-machine interaction: understanding what a person means to do before they do it. Merel's DeepMind background brought the physical AI architecture to execute on that intent. Fauna was founded specifically to apply that combination to social robots in home and public environments rather than to industrial tasks.

The product

Sprout launched in January 2026, priced at $50,000. The robot stands 42 inches tall, weighs around 50 pounds, and is designed for social spaces; it can walk, dance the Twist or the Floss, grip objects such as toy blocks, and rise from a chair. It cannot lift heavy objects. Fauna marketed Sprout as a modern platform for robotics development rather than a finished consumer product; built-in movement, control, and social behaviours are included, but developers must build applications on top. Early customers included Disney and Boston Dynamics. Safety was a deliberate design priority; the robot uses lightweight materials, a soft exterior, minimised pinch points, and compliant motor control that yields to external forces. Those features are uncommon in industrial humanoids and directly relevant to a company whose stated goal is robots that operate safely around children and pets.

The timeline

Fauna was founded in 2024, shipped its first product in January 2026, and was acquired in March 2026. That is approximately two years from founding to exit, with a product in customers' hands before the deal closed. The acquisition came less than a week after Amazon also acquired Rivr, a Swiss company developing stair-climbing delivery robots, suggesting a period of deliberate portfolio-building rather than an opportunistic single deal.

Amazon's context

Fauna joins the Personal Robotics Group, the same Amazon division that produced Astro, a home security and virtual assistant robot launched in 2021 that Amazon discontinued in 2024 after limited traction in both consumer and business markets. Amazon also abandoned its planned acquisition of iRobot that same year under regulatory pressure. Separately, Amazon laid off employees in its robotics division and cancelled its Blue Jay warehouse robotics project in early March 2026, weeks before the Fauna deal was announced.

Sprout's developer platform framing may be what distinguishes this attempt from Astro. Rather than launching a finished consumer product, Amazon appears to be acquiring the infrastructure to build the use case and data ecosystem first. Cochran has said that Fauna wanted to give developers the tools to build interesting applications; Amazon's stated position is that it is eager to learn from the creator community as they use Sprout.

Maturity

The acquisition terms were not disclosed and no consumer product has been announced. Amazon said Fauna will continue to seek new business after the deal. What Amazon plans to build from the Fauna foundation, and on what timeline, has not been made public.

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