Amazon acquires autonomous robotics startup Rivr
Amazon has acquired Rivr, the Zurich-based robotics startup formerly known as Swiss-Mile, confirming what multiple outlets reported Thursday and what an Amazon spokesperson confirmed directly to The Information. Financial terms were not disclosed.
The deal is notable less for what Amazon is buying — a 45-person wheeled-legged robot company — than for what it represents: a company Amazon already helped fund is now fully Amazon.
Rivr's roots run through one of Europe's most productive robotics labs. The company spun out of ETH Zurich's Robotic Systems Lab in April 2023, founded by Marko Bjelonic, Lorenz Wellhausen, Giorgio Valsecchi, and Alexander Reske — all veterans of work led by Professor Marco Hutter. In 2018, the team was among the first to deploy an artificial neural network on a real legged robot. They later won DARPA's Subterranean Challenge as part of the CERBERUS team, a competition The Washington Post called the Super Bowl of Robotics.
Amazon's fingerprints were already on Rivr. The company's $22 million seed round in August 2023 was co-led by Jeff Bezos's Bezos Expeditions and HongShan, the successor to Sequoia Capital China — but also included participation from the Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund. By 2024, Rivr's valuation had climbed to roughly $110 million, per sources cited by the wire.
The technology Rivr built is the point. Where most delivery robots are either wheeled or legged, Rivr's robots do both — wheels for flat surfaces, legs for stairs, curb cuts, and the uneven terrain of a real doorstep. The company called its approach General Physical AI and trained its systems using large-scale reinforcement learning in simulation combined with real-world self-supervised learning. A second-generation robot was unveiled shortly before the acquisition.
Amazon's robotics fleet is already massive. The company deployed its one-millionth robot in July 2025 at a facility in Japan, powered by a new DeepFleet AI model that cut robot travel times by 10 percent. The company says roughly 75 percent of its global deliveries are now assisted by some form of robotics. But the hard problem — the last hundred yards, the front porch, the stairs — has remained elusive.
Rivr's legged-wheeled hybrid was built specifically for that problem. A robot that can roll to the curb and then step up a porch, or navigate a building's stairwell, addresses exactly the gap between a distribution center and an actual delivery.
Amazon framed the acquisition as a safety investment. An Amazon spokesperson told The Information: This acquisition reflects our commitment to a continued investment in research, which we believe has the potential to further improve safety outcomes and the overall delivery experience for delivery service partners and their delivery associates.
What Amazon didn't say: Rivr's founders and technical team are ETH Zurich natives, and ETH Zurich's Robotic Systems Lab has been one of the primary feeders of top-tier robotics talent into commercial deployments for a decade. Buying Rivr is also buying a team.
The deal arrives as Amazon has pushed aggressively toward greater automation across its logistics network, with stated goals of having robotics assist an ever-larger share of its operations. It also raises questions about the future of Rivr's other partnerships — the company had close ties to NVIDIA, presenting at GTC conferences in both 2022 and 2025.
For now, Rivr's website remains live, with a statement acknowledging the acquisition in brief terms. The ETH Zurich connection runs deep enough that robotics watchers will be watching closely to see whether the lab's next cohort of researchers builds toward Amazon — or away from it.
Sources: The Information (primary, Amazon confirmation), Rivr.ai company history, Swiss-Mile / Rivr $22M seed round announcement (August 2023), CNBC / Amazon press release (July 1, 2025, millionth robot deployment), DARPA Subterranean Challenge records.