IN Brief:
- Amazon has acquired Zurich robotics company Rivr, which develops wheeled-legged robots for doorstep parcel delivery.
- Rivr had already been testing last-100-yard delivery with partners including Evri in the UK and Veho in the US.
- The acquisition gives Amazon a specialist platform for one of the most stubborn inefficiencies in last-mile logistics: the walk from van to front door.
Amazon has acquired Rivr, the Zurich-based robotics company focused on automating doorstep delivery. The deal brings in a business that has concentrated on the “last 100 yards” of parcel logistics, where drivers lose time walking packages from the vehicle to the customer’s door, often across stairs, gates, uneven paths, and awkward access points.
Rivr’s machines are unusual because they combine wheels and legs, allowing them to move efficiently on smoother surfaces while still handling the kind of terrain that defeats conventional sidewalk robots. The company had already been trialling that model in real parcel environments. In 2025 it launched a UK deployment with Evri in Barnsley and a US partnership with Veho in Austin, both framed around improving throughput while reducing repetitive physical strain on drivers.
The acquisition also closes a loop financially. Rivr, then operating as Swiss-Mile, raised a $22 million seed round in March 2025 backed by Bezos Expeditions and the Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund. Amazon therefore was not coming in cold; it had already watched the technology develop and had visibility on how the platform performed outside the lab.
For Amazon, the attraction is obvious. The largest delivery gains in mature last-mile networks often come from compressing the final seconds and metres rather than reinventing the whole route. If Rivr’s robots can reliably handle that doorstep segment in parallel with human drivers, Amazon is buying a tool that targets one of delivery’s most expensive remaining fragments.
