Swiss-Mile, which is designing and constructing quadrupeds and enabling them with embodied AI, has rebranded to a brand new title: RIVR.
The Zurich, Switzerland-based firm focuses on constructing bodily AI for last-mile supply, utilizing robots plus synthetic intelligence to boost effectivity and sustainability. As Swiss-Mile, it was identified for its integration of synthetic neural networks into robots with wheels and legs.
RIVR mentioned its expertise addresses the rising demand for smarter and greener logistics options in city environments.
RIVR is hiring
The renamed firm has a dozen open positions, together with a senior product supervisor. RIVR has been filling quite a few management positions over the previous yr, together with hiring Razwan Ghafoor as head of product and Ben Simmen as head of income in the midst of 2024.
Marko Bjelonic, co-founder and CEO of Swiss-Mile, mentioned he’s wanting ahead to being extra concerned in operations and manufacturing. Bringing in skilled individuals will allow him to focus extra on rising the enterprise, Bjelonic mentioned.
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Rebranding precedes discipline assessments
The choice to rebrand an organization isn’t a simple one. The announcement adopted Swiss-Mile’s profitable $22 million seed spherical in August 2024, co-led by Jeff Bezos, govt chairman of Amazon, by Bezos Expeditions and HSG. The corporate mentioned on the time that the funding demonstrated the business’s confidence in its imaginative and prescient and expertise.
With discipline testing scheduled to start this yr, RIVR plans to point out how its improvements can remodel one of the difficult and important elements of e-commerce logistics. RIVR is at present closing one other funding spherical, geared toward accelerating the event and deployment of its supply robots.
“It was time for an evolution of our model,” mentioned Bjeonic. “We’ve discovered product-market match and are actively working with main gamers within the logistics sector.”
“Swiss-Mile served us nicely once we had been a small group rising from college, however our ambitions prolong far past,” he defined. “We goal to develop into one of many world’s main robotics corporations, and for that imaginative and prescient, we’d like a reputation that may stand the take a look at of time. RIVR carries a robust and deep that means—one that may evolve with us as we transfer from proof of idea to scaling to a whole bunch of hundreds of robots.”
The corporate is concentrated on logistics functions for its wheeled quadruped robotic. By equipping it with wheels, RIVR mentioned the cell robotic can effectively transfer over lengthy distances utilizing its wheels, whereas additionally being able to traversing curbs, stairs and different obstacles utilizing legged locomotion as wanted. Its a novel kinematic design that solves lots of the challenges of last-mile supply, the corporate asserted.
“Working with main logistics carriers to deploy our robots for last-mile supply marks a major milestone in our mission to rework the area,” acknowledged Bjelonic.
He was just lately a visitor on The Robotic Report Podcast, the place he talked in regards to the evolution of the robotic.