Covariant, an AI startup co-founded by electrical engineering and computer sciences professor Pieter Abbeel, director of the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab and co-director of the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) lab, and building upon Berkeley research, has raised $40 million to boost hiring and adapt its AI robotics software to new industries. "What we've built is a universal brain for robotic manipulation tasks," says Covariant co-founder and CEO Peter Chen, a Berkeley alum and doctoral student in Professor Abbeel's lab. The COVID-19 pandemic has raised interest in robotics to help companies cope with dramatic shifts in consumer demand and to accommodate new limits on workplace operations, like spacing workers further apart. Stories on this topic have appeared in dozens of sources, including Venture Beat, TechCrunch, Robot Report, and Crunchbase News.