Amazon has acquired Fauna Robotics, the New York-based startup behind Sprout — a compact, soft-bodied humanoid platform built for human environments rather than factory floors. Roughly 50 Fauna staffers will join Amazon as part of the deal, Bloomberg reported.

A Different Kind of Robot

Sprout stands 3.5 feet tall and was designed from the ground up to operate around people. Unlike the heavy industrial machines that dominate warehouse robotics, Fauna built Sprout with a padded exterior, no pinch points or sharp edges, and an expressive face capable of communicating intent. The result is a robot that, according to the company, makes people lean in rather than step back.

Priced at $50,000, Sprout has been sold primarily to researchers, universities, and companies building applications on top of it. Early customers included Disney and Boston Dynamics. The platform ships with locomotion, perception, navigation, and expression working out of the box — letting developers focus on applications rather than the underlying hardware.

Amazon's Robotics Bet

The acquisition signals Amazon's continued expansion into humanoid robotics beyond its warehouse automation programs. Bloomberg reported that Amazon isn't currently planning to deploy Sprout in its operations — though the company has separately disclosed long-term goals to automate hundreds of thousands of roles through robotics.

Fauna's founding team includes veterans from CTRL-Labs (acquired by Meta), Google DeepMind, and Amazon itself. The company positioned Sprout explicitly as a platform for the 80% of the workforce in service industries — healthcare, education, eldercare — where the labor shortage is already acute and robots have historically been absent.

With this acquisition, Amazon now holds a consumer-facing humanoid platform alongside its existing logistics robotics portfolio, positioning itself across the full spectrum of the emerging robotics market.