In May of last year, Covariant announced that it had raised a $40 million Series B. It was a healthy sum of money for the young company, bringing its total funding up to $67 million. Just a little over a year later, the Berkeley-based AI startup is adding another $80 million to its coffers, riding on a wave that dramatically accelerated interest in robotics and AI during the pandemic.
“Companies across multiple industries had already been looking to realize significant gains with AI robotics and with COVID-19, market demands then increased by an order of magnitude,” president, chief scientist and co-founder Pieter Abbeel tells TechCrunch. “Combining this with our