AMAZON BUYS FAUNA ROBOTICS, MAKER OF THE SPROUT HUMANOID ROBOT

Amazon has confirmed the acquisition of Fauna Robotics, a New York-based startup behind Sprout, a compact humanoid robot designed for home and research environments.

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The deal signals a renewed push by Amazon into consumer robotics, expanding beyond warehouse automation and into more advanced household task systems.

Fauna Robotics, which recently introduced Sprout at a $50,000 price point, has positioned its robot as ‘‘approachable and human-friendly.’’ Standing approximately 42 inches tall and weighing about 50 pounds, Sprout features a bipedal design intended to navigate domestic spaces with greater flexibility than wheeled robots.

The acquisition folds Fauna’s roughly 50 employees into Amazon’s Personal Robotics Group, while the startup will continue operating under the name ‘‘Fauna, an Amazon company’’ as it maintains deployments of Sprout units to research institutions.

FROM WAREHOUSE AUTOMATION TO THE LIVING ROOM

Amazon is no stranger to robotics. The company has deployed more than one million robots across its fulfillment centers, where autonomous systems handle sorting, lifting, and inventory movement at scale. Those industrial robots are optimized for efficiency in structured environments, dramatically reshaping warehouse operations over the past decade.