The deal, Amazon’s second robotics acquisition this month, brings a 50-pound, 3.5-foot bipedal robot called Sprout into the company’s portfolio, less than two months after Fauna launched it to research and development partners. Terms were not disclosed.
The race to put a humanoid robot in every home has a new entrant. Amazon has acquired Fauna Robotics, a two-year-old New York startup whose robot, Sprout, is designed to be approachable enough to stand next to a child rather than behind a safety cage. The deal closed last week, according to people familiar with it cited by Bloomberg, and was confirmed by Amazon on Tuesday. Terms were not disclosed.
Fauna was founded in 2024 by Rob Cochran and Josh Merel, two engineers whose paths crossed at Meta. Cochran was head of product at CTRL-labs, a neural interface startup that Meta acquired in 2019, and later spent time at Goldman Sachs before returning to hardware.
Merel exited Google DeepMind, where he was a research scientist and manager, to join Cochran in building Fauna. The company’s roughly 50-person team in New York also includes veterans from Meta, Google DeepMind, and, notably, Amazon. Fauna raised $16.6 million in total funding before the acquisition.
Sprout, launched to R&D partners in January 2026, is deliberately not the kind of robot most people picture when they hear the word humanoid. It stands 3.5 feet tall and weighs 50 pounds, closer in stature to a ten-year-old than the six-foot industrial machines that Tesla and Boston Dynamics are building for factory floors.
It 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. Priced at $50,000, it is positioned explicitly as a developer platform: a canvas for researchers, educators, and corporate labs building applications for human-centric spaces, rather than a consumer product ready for mass-market shelves.
Early customers at launch included Disney, Boston Dynamics, UC San Diego, and NYU, a mix that signals both commercial and research interest in Sprout’s particular niche. Boston Dynamics, which itself makes full-size industrial humanoids under Hyundai ownership, is separately exploring what lighter, friendlier robots might look like in spaces beyond factories.
Its chief strategy officer told the AP at Sprout’s launch that the robot let you “see the future a little bit” in terms of machines that could be welcomed into homes.
For Amazon, the acquisition is a sharp strategic pivot from its previous consumer robotics track record. The company launched Astro, a wheeled home robot, in 2021 at $1,600, available only by invitation and still a niche product. Its planned $1.7 billion acquisition of iRobot, the Roomba maker, was scrapped in 2024 after regulatory pressure in the US and Europe.
Fauna is Amazon’s second robotics acquisition this month: it also confirmed last week the purchase of Rivr, a Zurich-based startup that makes a four-legged stair-climbing robot for last-mile delivery drivers. Fauna’s territory is different, consumer and research rather than logistics, which suggests Amazon is building an end-to-end robotics portfolio spanning warehouses, delivery, and eventually the home.
Fauna will operate as Fauna Robotics, an Amazon company, and its staff will remain in New York.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
