[11] Originally, Abbeel intended to pursue a master's degree in computer science, but decided to stay for his Ph.D. due to the abundance of AI projects happening at Stanford.

Additionally, in 2014, he co-founded Gradescope with other UC Berkeley-affiliated engineers Arjun Singh, Sergey Karayev, Ibrahim Awwal,[12] which was acquired by TurnItIn in 2018.

Also in 2016, he became co-director of the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) Lab, which consists of post-doctoral, graduate, and undergraduate students interested in machine learning and robotics.

In October 2017, Abbeel and three of his students, Peter Chen, Rocky Duan, and Tianhao Zhang, co-founded Covariant (formerly named Embodied Intelligence).

Based in Emeryville, California, Covariant launched in January 2020[16] and was covered in, among others, New York Times,[17] Wired,[18] MIT Technology Review,[19] and IEEE Spectrum.