Amazon acquiring Kiva Systems for $775 million | Hacker News Reader

Amazon acquiring Kiva Systems for $775 million

zdnet.com

151 pointsLiveTheDream42 comments

Kiva is a great company. They have been innovating since day 1, tapping into various industries. Last year, they put their robots on the floors of Boston Scientific's fulfillment center - a first for them in the highly-sensitive, highly-regulated medical arena. And, to be bought in CASH... I hope employees and the founding team made out well.

Also a great exit for Bain Capital.

Bain Capital Ventures. Venture Capital, not Private Equity.

I thought Bain Capital was the umbrella for all of their funds? Bain Capital Private Equity for the PE stuff and Bain Capital Ventures for the VC investments.

As I wrote on Hizook [1]... this acquisition is great news for robotics, but it kinda makes me sad. I would have liked to see Kiva go public. Plus, I certainly hope Amazon doesn't hoard Kiva away for itself and rob the world of efficient, robotic warehouses...

[1] http://www.hizook.com/blog/2012/03/19/breaking-news-amazon-a...

It's a great time to start a robotics company and I hope this exit will further accelerate the pace of new companies being created! Kiva is also a great example of nailing a single high-value problem even if it's not the sexiest challenge.

Unfortunately you can't start a robotics startup with almost no money (like sw startups) !

Kiva Systems was started with almost no money...

It's actually one of the better stories I've heard. The founder basically found various phds that were researching in related fields and convinced them to work for equity.

Almost no money...Do you have specific details/article ?

I would still think to make the prototypes and get the initial robots manufactured must have cost a pretty penny.

yeah, there's more to it. The founder Mick Mountz was an HBS guy, he went around for awhile networking with alums to try to get the initial cash investment. Eventually connected with Ajay Agarwal of Bain and landed some seed money.

I'm trying to remember more, he spoke at a class I was in.

His office was his small apartment with a whiteboard. In the morning he would go out for a cup of coffee, and when he came back it was his office. If he didn't do that, it wouldn't feel like an office.

Previously he had worked with Webvan, and one of their costs that was unexpectedly high was product fulfillment. Kiva was built partly as a solution to that problem (though it was after Webvan went bankrupt).

Their initial prototypes (we saw pictures of them) we're extremely scrappy, and I believe too big to realistically be used. I think they raised money with the prototype and computer simulations?

The robots are talked to wirelessly, and apparently wireless represented a major technical challenge (it was before wifi took off I believe).

The co-founder with robo-soccer experience was targeted. He said something along the lines of "If you can make a robot play soccer, you can definitely make a robot follow a grid and pick up shelving."

I got the impression that he gave up a lot of equity to get co-founders at seemingly late points in the game, but didn't regret it. I think people normally put a ton of effort into maintaining equity, sometimes at the risk of losing a great team member. It looks things worked out.

The great thing about this company is that it's indisputably the best solution available, although high costs mitigate some customers. He told the story of a stress test they did with one major brand name. To simulate high buying season, they held up regular orders for three days, then pushed them through at once without an issue.

Other cool benefits: despite having to power these robots, the power bills with Kiva end up being less expensive because of savings in lighting, heating and AC. Most fulfillment solutions require the entire warehouse to be lit up and heated so a person can comfortably work, while Kiva keeps the main warehouse dark and temperature doesn't matter much.

At the time, they were the fulfillment solution of some companies that Amazon had acquired, but not Amazon itself. I suspect that's going to change.

I may be able to provide some limited insight as well (source: used to work there, still keep in touch with a few people).

IIRC, Kiva raised ~$18M in funding, most of it from Bain. I read an article recently which broke it down to ~$1.5M in angel, with the remainder coming from Bain, but I can't track it down right now. Not a huge amount, but definitely not "no money". Great place to work, but most of that money was going right to the robots. :)

The robots do use Wi-Fi, but there are challenges with a multi-robot system of that scale which are somewhat novel, especially when they had to invent a lot of the backend IT infrastructure to get them to work.

The co-founders definitely came in right at the beginning, and it was Raff's robo-soccer team which actually inspired the concept of shelves which can "walk and talk." They found a great market - the Kiva approach isn't the best for all approaches, but it does happen to be particularly well suited for online retailers.

Also, a Kiva system is probably the closest you can come to real-life Frogger, but playing in the dark is not recommended.

According to reports, Kiva raised around $33 Million in VC funding [1]. Like I wrote before [2]:

I've been tracking venture capital (VC) funding of robotics companies for the better part of two years. Based on my (limited) data, VC funding in robotics exceeded $160 Million for 2011. This is just a rounding error compared to VC funding of Internet (web-based) companies, which hit a decade-long high of $6.9 Billion in 2011. My hope is that robotics will get more love in the next year(s), but getting VC funding for robotics is a decidedly tough nut to crack. Robotics companies have large capital requirements for robot hardware, few potential acquirers, and almost no "Google-scale" breakout success stories (ie. IPOs). I mean, c'mon... one of the best known robotics companies, iRobot, has a market cap of just $700 Million. This makes robotics a difficult sell to your typical VC firm. My hope is that this list can give others courage to pursue "swing for the fences" type projects along with a source for robotics-friendly VC firms.

So this acquisition is good news for robotics, and _exceeded_ the entire market cap of iRobot. Like I mentioned in a previous comment, I hope Amazon doesn't hoard Kiva to itself and rob the world of efficient, robotic warehouses.

[1] http://www.hizook.com/blog/2012/03/19/breaking-news-amazon-a...

[2] http://www.hizook.com/blog/2012/03/01/venture-capital-vc-fun...

To me this is another piece of scalable infrastructure they can offer to other companies.

Perhaps, but it seems to me that it is a competitive advantage they might not want to give up. More akin to Google's server warehouse design than AWS.

I don't know the exact situation of Google's server warehouse design. But I presume that was developed in-house. Kiva already has other big customers that rely on it for their order fulfillment. Like said in this thread, making your competitors into customers is a smart move.

Yup agreed, though I would like to know what the parent commenter experiences have been, since it seems hes involved with some robotics/AI research.

I previously posted the following about when will the robotic revolution will occur, to which I got some pretty good answers: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3630139

My experience is limited, but there are now at least two hardware startup accelerators (in the bay area), I've watched a robot project go from idea to kickstarter to seed funding, another robot kickstarter go viral and get funded, watched a robot company raise money from the inside, and seen the explosion of open source designs and software for robots. All this in the last two years.

I don't think we're that close to your vision of the robot revolution (we need stronger AI first) but there are many places where robots are now technologically and financially viable where they weren't 5 or 10 years ago.

*Edited for clarity.

Options exist!

http://haxlr8r.com/

http://www.lemnoslabs.com/

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/peterseid/romo-the-smart...

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/147564168/bilibot-an-aff...

Maybe it's just me, but watching all those robots move with purpose across the inventory floors is pretty damn sexy. lol

On both a very unrelated and totally related note, one of the co-founders of Kiva, Rafaello D'Andrea, dominated robo-soccer for five years.

I wonder if preventing their competitors from using Kiva is part of the goal for this acquisition.

Or, perhaps even better, making your competition your customer.

I agree, this is more likely given their behavior with AWS. They're happy to rent their IP and infrastructure to competitors.

I would have gone for this Norwegian system: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iyVDMp2bL9c

Interesting video but the system appears to only be a small parts solution. I don't think it could even handle a 20" monitor.

That system may be in Norway, but the technology is made by a company called Swisslog, which is located in Switzerland.

One interesting question is what will happen to the current clients of Kiva (of which many are competing with Amazon in ecommerce market) newegg. etc ??

Good question. I hope they keep innovating and serving all clients rather than it being a competitive advantage move for Amazon itself as an in-house robotics developer.

I think they will be getting the same service from Kiva.

Netflix is one of the biggest user of EWS, yet, Amazon is pushing hard on their streaming service too.

If amazon wouldn't have offered EWS to netflix or have stopped offering it to netflix, netflix could have easily use some other cloud competitor. Maybe netflix would had to pay a bit more , but i don't think it would have been a big difference.

I don't know much about kiva but if their service is hard to replace and is a unique competitive advantage(and looking at the purchase price,it seems so), amazon would use this advantage.Amazon is known to play hardball.

Netflix actually can't switch to an AWS competitor at this point because none of them are big enough. (source is some random cloud infrastructure presentation they did)

When AWS started they were basically running off the "christmas season" and end-of-life amazon.com boxes with almost no up front expenditures. Everyone else in the "cloud" business is buying new boxes to build out, which means its really hard for them to get to scale or handle surge loads.

This one:

http://perfcap.blogspot.in/2012/03/cloud-architecture-tutori...

???

Yup. That is the one. Thanks!

Weirdly, Amazon and Netflix fill different niches for me. Amazon's player is flash so it works for me in linux, so I use that when I'm on my computer. However Netflix has an application for my (non-Fire) android device, so I use that there.

I really wish they would start pushing on each other harder, so I could use only one for both...

What if Amazon were just positioning itself to do rebranded fulfillment? i.e. First Amazon equipment is sold to Target, etc. distribution centers; but you could spend more and have Amazon actually run the center; or you could have Amazon's distribution centers use your branded boxes and use their fulfillment centers.

This can also ease a lot of the criticism that Amazon is getting about slave-driving the (human) pickers in their warehouses lately.

Until the robots unionize, of course.

True. Ironically this will also result in criticism about how Amazon isn't employing enough humans.

This is a very smart play on part of Amazon. They have around 65 fulfillment centers and they are adding more this year.[1]

It costs around 15-20million to get a kiva system for a large fulfillment center.[2] With the number of kiva system amazon would need in those centres they surely saved a whole bag of money by buying the company instead of just systems, not to mention first dibs on future innovations.

[1]http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/19/amazon-acquires-online-fulf...

[2]http://www.fastcompany.com/most-innovative-companies/2012/ki...

I was wondering if anyone was going to draw the connection between today's news and this story from a few weeks ago: "I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3641184

Was I the only one who thought that $775 million seemed like quite bit of cash for a non-profit micro-lendng company...oh wait, not that one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com