Fauna Robotics
"Capable, Safe, Fun Robots for Everyone"
NYC-based humanoid robotics company that built Sprout, a 3.5-ft, 50-lb developer-ready bipedal robot priced at $50,000; acquired by Amazon in March 2026.
Fauna Robotics was founded in 2024 in New York City by Rob Cochran and Josh Merel, two engineers who previously worked together at Meta. Cochran had been head of product at CTRL-labs, the neural interface startup acquired by Meta in 2019, while Merel was a research scientist and manager at Google DeepMind. The company's roughly 50-person team also included veterans from Amazon and NYU.
Fauna's flagship product is Sprout, a bipedal humanoid robot designed explicitly as a developer and research platform for use in human-centric environments such as homes, schools, and commercial spaces. Sprout stands 1.07 meters (3.5 feet) tall and weighs 22.7 kg (50 lbs). It features 29 degrees of freedom: 6-DoF arms with floor-to-countertop reach, 5-DoF compliant legs for low-impact bipedal locomotion, and a 2-DoF neck. Compute is provided by an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin module. Sensors include a ZED 2i stereoscopic camera, time-of-flight sensors, an IMU, and a microphone array. A full-color 360-degree facial LED array with motorized eyebrows gives the robot expressive capabilities designed to put humans at ease. The Creator Edition was priced at $50,000.
Sprout was designed to be safe and approachable in shared human spaces rather than optimized for industrial throughput. Early customers at launch included Disney, Boston Dynamics, UC San Diego, and NYU. The robot shipped with an open software stack intended to lower the barrier for developers building humanoid applications.
Fauna raised between $16.6 million and approximately $30 million from investors including Kleiner Perkins and Lux Capital. The company's scientific co-founder Lerrel Pinto is a professor at New York University; his involvement was publicly noted by AI researcher Yann LeCun in early 2024.
In March 2026, Amazon acquired Fauna Robotics. The acquisition brought Sprout's hardware platform and the Fauna team's expertise in human-safe bipedal robotics into Amazon's growing robotics portfolio.
Primary type & automation activities this supplier delivers:
Sprout Creator Edition
- Model: Sprout
- Launch Year: 2024
3.5-ft, 50-lb bipedal humanoid developer platform with 29 DoF and NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin compute.
More related news
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
-
6
IROS 2026 Category Award Finalists: All 22 Papers RobotToday · Oct 07, 2026
-
7
IROS 2026 by the Numbers: Papers, Countries, Topics RobotToday · Oct 07, 2026
-
8
IROS 2026 Best Paper Finalists: South Korea Leads RobotToday · Oct 07, 2026
-
9
IFA 2027 – Berlin, Sep 3–7, 2027 RobotToday · Oct 06, 2026
-
10
Ai4 2027 – Las Vegas, Aug 2–5, 2027 RobotToday · Oct 06, 2026
-
11
WRC 2027: World Robot Conference, Beijing, opens Aug 18 RobotToday · Oct 06, 2026
- 12
-
13
Meta Acquires ARI to Capture the Brain of the Humanoid Robot RobotToday · May 02, 2026
-
14
RobotToday Weekly Industry Briefing: March 23 – March 27, 2026 RobotToday · Mar 28, 2026
-
15
HUMANOID ROBOTICS | Amazon Acquires Fauna Robotics to Advance “Approachable” Consumer Humanoids RobotToday · Mar 25, 2026
- 16
- 17
- 18
-
19
RobotToday Weekly Industry Briefing: January 26 – 30, 2026 RobotToday · Jan 31, 2026
- 20
Contact Fauna Robotics
WEBSITE
https://faunarobotics.comHEADQUARTERS
United States
Company Facts
Founded
2024
Primary Role
Manufacturer
Company Size
-
Primary Region
North America
Annual Sales
-
Funding Stage
-
Funding Total
-
