freetherobots

I may be able to provide some limited insight as well (source: used to work there, still keep in touch with a few people).

IIRC, Kiva raised ~$18M in funding, most of it from Bain. I read an article recently which broke it down to ~$1.5M in angel, with the remainder coming from Bain, but I can't track it down right now. Not a huge amount, but definitely not "no money". Great place to work, but most of that money was going right to the robots. :)

The robots do use Wi-Fi, but there are challenges with a multi-robot system of that scale which are somewhat novel, especially when they had to invent a lot of the backend IT infrastructure to get them to work.

The co-founders definitely came in right at the beginning, and it was Raff's robo-soccer team which actually inspired the concept of shelves which can "walk and talk." They found a great market - the Kiva approach isn't the best for all approaches, but it does happen to be particularly well suited for online retailers.

Also, a Kiva system is probably the closest you can come to real-life Frogger, but playing in the dark is not recommended.