Strio.AI

Agricultural Robotics · Autonomous Vehicles

Acquisition

Amazon's Zoox acquires strawberry-harvesting robotics startup Strio.AI

Picking ripe fruit and navigating city streets both demand split-second visual judgment, a skill Zoox is betting translates directly.

• Zoox, Amazon's self-driving car unit, acquired Strio.AI, a startup that built computer-vision robots to harvest strawberries, and plans to fold its technology into robotaxi design.
• Strio.AI was founded in 2020 by MIT alumni and is based in Boston; its robots used automated computer vision to pick crops like strawberries after pandemic-era labor shortages hit farms.
• Strio.AI co-founder and CEO Ruijie He is joining Zoox as a director overseeing vehicle perception design, alongside four senior engineers who will join Zoox's engineering team.
• Zoox and the former Strio.AI team plan to set up a joint research and development base on the U.S. East Coast, extending Zoox's footprint beyond its traditional West Coast base.
• The deal lands as Zoox ramps up commercial robotaxi service, including charging for rides in Las Vegas and extending that service to Harry Reid International Airport under a temporary NHTSA exemption.
• Robotaxi developers are increasingly treating real-world perception as the core bottleneck, and buying up vision talent from unrelated fields like agriculture shows how transferable that computer-vision expertise is seen to be.