Mick Mountz
Mick Mountz is an American engineer and entrepreneur who founded Kiva Systems in 2003, whose mobile robots brought shelves to pickers, and sold it to Amazon in 2012 for $775 million.
What they did and why it matters
Mountz introduced robotic goods-to-person fulfillment, which changed how large e-commerce warehouses pick orders. After seeing high fulfillment costs at the online grocer Webvan, he set out to replace fixed conveyors and picker walking with mobile robots that carry shelving pods to stationary workers. Kiva systems were used by several retailers before Amazon bought the company and renamed it Amazon Robotics. Today's autonomous mobile robots, robots-as-a-service offers, and the shift toward flexible automation that can grow with volume all follow the path Kiva opened.
Related people
Events
Sources
- 10 Things You Need to Know About Mick Mountz (National Inventors Hall of Fame) invent.org
- Mick Mountz (Wikipedia) en.wikipedia.org