Amazon-owned robotaxi agency Zoox this week introduced that it has acquired Strio.AI. The Boston-based robotics startup was based in 2020 by MIT alumns to deliver autonomous selecting and pruning to strawberry crops. It acquired up and working shortly through the pandemic, bringing its first prototype system to farms in California and Florida inside about six months.
The acquisition is extra of an acqui-hire, actually. Strio co-founder and CEO Ruijie He joins Zoox as director of Notion, whereas 4 of its senior engineers shall be built-in into the staff. The transfer additionally finds the Bay Space-based Zoox opening its first East Coast R&D web site with the Strio staff.
“Throughout our conversations with RJ and the opposite members of the Strio.AI staff, we have been frequently impressed by their technical experience, entrepreneurial spirit, and method to creating state-of-the-art notion programs,” Zoox stated in a weblog submit. “We’re thrilled to welcome them aboard as we proceed advancing our autonomous expertise.”
The acquisition signifies that Strio shall be winding down its ag tech work, as a substitute integrating their work in issues like notion into Zoox’s broader robotaxi plans. The transfer comes a number of weeks after Bowery Farming acquired Traptic’s strawberry-picking robots for integration into its indoor vertical farms. Just like the Zoox transfer, Bowery’s acquisition successfully took Traptic’s robots out of the sphere.
Standard knowledge holds that there’s quite a lot of alternative for autonomous robotics in ag tech, however most of the essential gamers within the class have had problem making it too far down that street. Considerable’s apple-picking robots are one other key instance. Although for the robotics class typically, acquisition is commonly a strong end result, notably for a younger firm like Strio.
For Zoox, in the meantime, it means entry to extra expertise and a presence within the robotics analysis hub of Boston.