Amazon and Jeff Bezos invest in Swiss-Mile

Swiss-Mile has raised 22 million dollars in an early financing round. According to a press release, it was led by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos via his investment company Bezos Expeditions and HongShan, the Chinese arm of Silicon Valley venture capital giant Sequoia. The Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund, Armada Investment from Zurich as the only European investor and the existing investor Linear Capital based in Shanghai have also participated.

They are all convinced that Swiss-Mile will play a leading role in the embodied intelligence sector with its robot dog on wheels. The Zurich-based robotics start-up emerged from Professor Marco Hutter's Robotic Systems Lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH) in April 2023. The robotics pioneer is part of the founding team of Swiss-Mile and in June received this year's Rössler Prize from the ETH Foundation, the ETH's most valuable research prize worth 200,000 Swiss francs.

The founders have enabled four-legged robots with wheels under their feet to walk, drive, stand upright on two legs and handle packages with wheel-driven end effectors. By integrating reinforcement and supervised learning into a unified framework, these robots can learn autonomously and adapt based on their real-world missions.

Swiss-Mile has reportedly begun pilot integrations with beta customers around the world. They will enable tests of this embodied artificial intelligence in various real-world environments. According to Daniel S. Aegerter, CEO and founder of Armada Investment, the wealth of potential use cases will "usher in a new era of economic activity".

According to its head Franziska Bossart, the Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund is pleased to "support the team, as we have recognized the potential of these technologies for Amazon". ce/mm