Summary
Marko Bjelonic is the co-founder and CEO of RIVR (formerly Swiss-Mile), a Zurich-based robotics company that builds wheeled-legged robots for doorstep delivery. A roboticist trained at ETH Zurich, he pioneered optimization-based control methods for combining wheels and legs on a single robot during his PhD, then spun that research into a company that raised seed funding from Jeff Bezos and was acquired by Amazon in March 2026.
Career
Bjelonic was born in 1990 in Banja Luka, in what was then Yugoslavia (now Bosnia and Herzegovina). He earned a Bachelor’s degree (2013) and Master’s degree (2016) in mechanical engineering from the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany, spending the first year of his master’s at the Cybernetics department of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway. During his studies, he worked at Mercedes-AMG and the Fraunhofer Institute for Structural Durability and System Reliability (LBF) in Germany, and spent time at Australia’s CSIRO in Brisbane in 2015-2016, where he worked with researchers Alberto Elfes and Navinda Kottege on multi-legged robots and developed the hexapod robot Weaver as part of his master’s thesis (NCCR Digital Fabrication).
From 2017 to 2021, Bjelonic pursued a PhD in robotics at ETH Zurich’s Robotic Systems Lab, supervised by Professor Marco Hutter (ETH Zurich), Professor Stelian Coros (ETH Zurich), and Professor Sangbae Kim (MIT). His doctoral thesis, “Planning and Control for Hybrid Locomotion of Wheeled-Legged Robots,” developed an optimization-based framework enabling ANYbotics’ ANYmal quadruped — fitted with non-steerable wheels on its legs — to drive at up to 4 meters per second on flat ground, cross obstacles at 1.5 meters per second, and cut its cost of transport by 83% compared to walking alone. The thesis won ETH Zurich’s Hans-Eggenberger-Prize in 2022 (ETH Zurich; Marko Bjelonic — Research).
Bjelonic continued as a postdoctoral researcher at the Robotic Systems Lab while co-founding Swiss-Mile with three lab colleagues — Lorenz Wellhausen, Giorgio Valsecchi, and Alexander Reske — to commercialize the wheeled-legged robotics research. As CEO, he led the company through its incorporation in April 2023, a $22 million seed round in 2024 co-led by Jeff Bezos, and its 2025 rebrand from Swiss-Mile to RIVR. He has described RIVR’s four-legged wheeled robot to TechCrunch as being like “a dog on roller skates.” In March 2026, Amazon acquired RIVR, and Bjelonic has continued as CEO of the company under Amazon’s ownership (LinkedIn).
Source Notes
This profile draws on Bjelonic’s LinkedIn profile, his personal research website, an ETH Zurich prize announcement, an NCCR Digital Fabrication research profile confirming his birth year and early career, and his ETH Zurich doctoral thesis record. Details of his life after the Amazon acquisition, including his exact current role and compensation, should be re-verified as more information becomes public.