Corvus Robotics names former Kiva Systems Executive Rob Stevens to its board of directors

Stevens to advise on strategy, sales, and strategic partnerships for embodied AI startup

Corvus Robotics, a provider of autonomous inventory management systems, today announced that it has recruited Rob Stevens, former VP of Business Development, Sales, Professional Services, and Strategy at Kiva Systems, a pioneer in mobile robotic fulfillment systems, to its board of directors. At Corvus Robotics, Stevens will leverage his business development and strategic partnership expertise to guide the groundbreaking embodied AI startup as to how to best grow its footprint throughout America's distribution centers.

Stevens joined Kiva Systems as employee 19 as vice president of business development and, over the next six years, led at various points key go-to-market functions, including marketing, sales, product management, professional services strategy, and international expansion, leading to the company's sale to Amazon in March 2012 for $775 million. At the time, this was Amazon's second-largest acquisition in its history and the single largest acquisition for venture-backed warehouse robotics companies. Today, Amazon's warehouse robots based on the Kiva system are the largest warehouse robot fleet in the world with over 500,000 robots managing Amazon fulfillment operations around the world. After Kiva, Stevens went on to lead commercial operations at companies including Backupify, GrabCAD and Tive. Today, Stevens is well known as a consultant, advisor, operator, and investor who brings sales, marketing and go-to-market expertise to early stage B2B startups.

"Distribution center operators are constantly seeking new ways to improve performance with better information, especially when it comes to inventory accuracy," said Stevens. "The embodied AI and autonomy behind the Corvus One drone systems finally gives managers the ground-truth inventory data they need with zero labor. As an investor in and long-time fan of supply chain automation, I'm excited to see this new generation of technology assisting distribution managers."

Corvus One drones autonomously navigate using a proprietary AI large world model (LWM), which uses a learning-based approach to autonomy to understand what inventory is where, what to look for, and how to interact with and navigate in the environment. It's this embodied AI technology that has enabled the Corvus One system to bring, for the first time anywhere in the world, the ability to fly its drone-powered system in a lights-out distribution center without human operators or any added localization infrastructure like stickers or beacons.

"As the management executive who led commercialization at Kiva Systems, Rob at various points was responsible for each key, go-to-market function for what eventually became the largest warehouse robot fleet in the world with Amazon. Kiva Systems is a company I immensely respect, as one of the earliest venture-backed successes in the warehouse robotics space, and I view it as a previous generation's "grandparent" of today's warehouse robotic companies," said Jackie Wu, co-founder and CEO, Corvus Robotics. "We are looking forward to tapping into Rob's experience and network to put Corvus Robotics on a trajectory to commercial success like that enjoyed by Kiva and Amazon."