Last week at ProMat, I took a deep dive with Covariant co-founder and CEO Peter Chen. The timing was perfect or terrible, depending on who you ask.The startup correspondent is happy to say I’m writing a follow-up to his new funding round opportunity a week later. No doubt.
Anyway, $75 million is a hard number to ignore. Notably, the Series C expansion brings the AI company’s total funding to his $222 million. Existing investors Radical Ventures and Index Ventures led the round, with new investors (Pension Plan Investment Board and Amplify Partners) and repeat investors (Gates Frontier Holdings, AIX Ventures and Northgate Capital) also participating. The round adds to his $80 million Series C announced in July 2021.
“This investment will allow us to further develop Covariant Brain as a more capable underlying model and apply Covariant Brain to even more use cases in different sectors,” Chen told TechCrunch. “As the demand for e-commerce continues to grow and supply chain resilience becomes more important, we are making great strides with global retailers and logistics providers and look forward to revealing details of these partnerships soon. looking forward to it. ”
I also got a demo of Covariant’s technology at a trade show last month. Knowing what’s going on under the hood can empower picking and placing. At the heart of the logistics play is the covariant brain. It builds a large database of potential package sizes, shapes, and materials based on real-world choices.
In our conversation, Chen used generative AI/ChatGPT as an analogy. However, with three of his four co-founders on the team having direct ties to his OpenAI, this isn’t just the latest hype he’s loosely connected to his cycle.
Chen says:
Before the recent ChatGPT, there was a lot of natural language processing AI. There have been many natural language AIs out there, such as search, translation, sentiment detection, and spam detection. The approach before GPT is to train a specific AI with a small subset of data for each use case. Looking at the results now, GPT has basically abolished the field of translation and has not been trained to translate. The foundation model approach is essentially a large foundation general model with more data, rather than using a small amount of data specific to one situation or training a model specific to one situation. Train a generalized model to make AI more general.
The funds will be used to further roll out Covariant’s system to retailers and logistics companies.
