Building on Australia’s legacy of groundbreaking industrial innovations – from CSIRO’s development of Wi-Fi technology to the black box flight recorder – Amazon is inviting Australian entrepreneurs to the US$1 billion Industrial Innovation Fund.

The program which supports emerging technology companies with direct investments, aims to help spur and support warehouse automation and supply chain innovation.

Since launching in 2022, it has made close to a dozen investments in promising technologies. Most recently, investments have been made in Rightbot, which is developing a system to automate the unloading of containers, and Instock, which has designed a robotic storage and retrieval system that offers efficient inventory management.

The Industrial Innovation Fund is led by Franziska Bossart, who has over 20 years of experience working in corporate venture capital and digital transformation.

“We launched our inaugural Innovation Challenge program this year to uncover, elevate, and accelerate groundbreaking technologies addressing real-world challenges in our industry,” she said.

“We are excited about the Innovation Challenge initiative to further foster collaboration with AI and robotics entrepreneurs and provide direct access to Amazon’s resources.”

Trends Ms Bossart expects to see across industrial technology investments this year include more widespread use of intelligent systems that can process large amounts of data, make decisions, and learn from experience; progress in computer vision systems; and new approaches with hardware.

“I believe there will be meaningful progress with bi-pedal robots … and we’re interested in further exploring this space, she said. “Last October, we announced with Agility Robotics a new pilot to test their Digit robot in our operations, and we’re looking forward to learn more about how we can use a mobile manipulation system within our operations.”

Learn more about Amazon’s Industrial Innovation Fund here.