That's what's so striking about Kiva. They basically make one model of robot with minor variations. Kiva was about 500 employees when Amazon bought them. Yet that was enough to handle 20% of online fulfillment. Pets.com, Diapers.com, Abercrombie and Fitch, and many other major brands used Kiva robots.
Most of the other automation companies do vast amounts of custom engineering work. Every customer is different. For Kiva, every customer is the same, and the product line is simple. Kiva is the first company to achieve this in robotics. (Well, there's the Roomba, if you consider that a robot.)
Although Amazon is only using Kiva in 10 of its warehouses. So we're not really talking about all of amazon.
of course, I don't think that any Kiva's former customers were running all their warehouses using Kiva either...
IIRC the reason Kiva stopped selling outside of Amazon was because Amazon literally bought all of the units they were capable of making..
I don't think that's right. They only had about $100m in revenue when Amazon acquired them.
Also, it's not a given that their market share has increased since Amazon acquired them. Amazon stopped Kiva's marketing and dedicated all of Kiva's manufacturing to themselves for years. Even today, Kiva produces robots for Amazon.
All non-Amazon customers are simply being maintained. Kiva hasn't signed up a new customer since Amazon acquired them.
Here's a direct competitor to Kiva. This approach, with tiny robot cranes, is less successful. ... Another competitor. This one uses an overhead robotic crane.
That's a single company called Swisslog and they have quite a few products in this space: http://www.swisslog.com/
They also have a product that's nearly identical to Kiva:
http://www.swisslog.com/Products/WDS/Storage-Systems/CarryPi...