Congratulations to RIVR on Joining Amazon

We’re thrilled to congratulate RIVR on being acquired by Amazon.

Based in Zurich, RIVR is one of those rare companies building at the frontier where robotics meets the real world. The team is tackling a deceptively hard problem: the final steps of delivery, where environments are unstructured, every doorstep is different, and reliability matters. This “last stretch” is where automation has historically struggled most, and it is exactly where RIVR chose to focus.

HSG was proud to co-lead the Zurich-based company’s seed round in August 2024 alongside Bezos Expeditions. From our earliest conversations, what stood out was the team’s clarity and conviction.

They saw two things clearly from the start. First, meaningful breakthroughs in robotics do not come only from better data, better hardware, or better software in isolation. They come from building a full system that can learn continuously from real-world experience.

Second, they were practical about where to start. Rather than pursuing a broad, abstract robotics vision, RIVR anchored its mission in doorstep delivery, a use case with enormous scale and daily repetition, which makes it a uniquely powerful engine for gathering real-world data and improving autonomy over time.

What RIVR built

RIVR’s mission is to build General Physical AI through doorstep delivery. In practice, that means deploying autonomous legged robots in the field, while using each run to improve the underlying system.

The company’s approach is full stack, combining hardware built for mobility in unstructured environments and software that learns from both simulation and real-world experience. The result is a platform built from day one around reliability, safety, and cost efficiency.

RIVR has also shown what a scaled last-mile system can look like – an autonomous vehicle that acts as a mobile distribution hub, with robots that handle the final meters to the customer’s door across stairs, sidewalks, and curbs.

A meaningful milestone, and an even bigger opportunity ahead

Amazon’s acquisition is a meaningful validation of the team’s progress and of the opportunity in physical automation at the doorstep. We’re especially excited about what this can unlock for RIVR’s mission. With Amazon’s scale and operational footprint, the RIVR team has the chance to accelerate real-world deployment and push the frontier of Physical AI even faster.

Thank you to the RIVR team

To Marko, Lorenz, Giorgio, Alexander, and the entire RIVR team: congratulations. Building in robotics takes unusual perseverance, technical depth, and courage. We’re grateful to have been part of your journey, and we’re excited to cheer you on as you begin this next chapter at Amazon.