Fauna Robotics

About Fauna Robotics

Fauna Robotics was founded in 2024 in New York City by Rob Cochran (CEO, formerly CTRL-labs/Meta) and Josh Merel (CTO, formerly DeepMind). The USD 30M seed round was led by Kleiner Perkins; on 24 March 2026 Amazon bought the company, which continues as "Fauna Robotics, an Amazon company".

Its only product is the Sprout Creator Edition (since 27 January 2026): 107 cm, 22.7 kg, 29 DoF, NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin, Python and C++ SDK, pre-trained walking, dancing and conversation. Early customers include Disney, Boston Dynamics, UC San Diego and NYU; the press quotes a price of about USD 50,000.

The "AR-1" label seen in overview graphics is not used by the manufacturer — it is Sprout.

For ROBOTio, Fauna is a direct competitor of the Unitree G1 EDU in schools and research. It sells only in the USA; for Czech schools we recommend the G1 EDU and the ROBOTio Academy programme today.

Fauna Robotics models at ROBOTio

• Fauna Sprout (AR-1) — Developer humanoid: 107 cm, 22.7 kg, 29 DoF, Jetson AGX Orin, SDK, 3–3.5 h runtime.

Who Fauna Robotics makes sense for

Schools and universities

An open platform for teaching and research on motion and interaction.

Entertainment

Disney as a first customer — a small, expressive, safe robot.

Corporate development

Testing behaviours before moving to larger platforms.

Availability & service in Europe

• Sales to researchers, schools and developers in the USA via a request form
• European availability and service
• Amazon's strategy after the acquisition

• For Czech schools we compare Sprout with the Unitree G1 EDU by SDK, sensors and service — the G1 EDU is more accessible in Europe today.
• For events with children we use the 130 cm G1.

Service and support status on ServisRobot.cz — The overview shows which models we service and to what extent.

Official website