Amazon self-driving car company Zoox acquires strawberry-picking robotics startup Strio.AI

Zoox, now an Amazon-owned self-driving car company, announced earlier that it has acquired Strio.AI, a startup that builds robots for harvesting strawberries, and plans to integrate its technology into its self-driving vehicle designs.

Strio.AI was founded in 2020 by MIT alumni and is headquartered in Boston. The robots it builds mainly use computer vision and other automated designs to pick strawberries and other crops, helping farms solve the problem of being unable to hire enough workers to pick crops during the pandemic.

After joining Zoox, Strio.AI co-founder and CEO Ruijie He will serve as Zoox director of insights, responsible for designing vehicle perception capabilities, while the rest of the four senior engineer team members will also join the Zoox engineering team. At the same time, Zoox will also set up a research and development base on the U.S. East Coast together with Strio.AI.

However, after being acquired by Zoox, this means that Strio.AI's original technology focused on agricultural harvesting applications will come to an end, and its technology will be integrated into self-driving vehicle designs in the future.