When Kiva Systems was acquired by Amazon in 2012, the robot maker was in a category of its own: making bots for e-commerce fulfillment in large warehouses.
But when Amazon absorbed Kiva’s technology, it stopped selling its robots to e-commerce fulfillment centers outside of Amazon (Kiva, now known as Amazon Robotics, is based in North Reading and has 30,000 of its bots roaming Amazon warehouses around the country).
Hallie Siegel’s insight:
More competition for Amazon – but a very different system.