[1] The company was founded in 2017, under the name Embodied Intelligence,[2] by Pieter Abbeel, Peter Chen, Rocky Duan, and Tianhao Zhang.

[5] Their purpose in starting the company was to bring an advanced level of robotic automation to factories and warehouses,[5] by building software to enable existing robot hardware to handle a wider range of tasks through a hybrid system of imitation learning and reinforcement learning.

[6] Building upon their research at Berkeley, the founders spent more than two years designing the Covariant Brain, AI-driven software that powers a robotic arm, enabling it to perform labor in a warehouse.

[7] In 2018, the company began collecting data from 30 variations of robot arms in warehouses around the world, all of which ran using the Covariant Brain.

[10] Their technology enables robot arms to pick and sort items from bins at rates exceeding human performance.