Sunday evening is legendary robotics company iRobot, manufacturer Rumba robot vacuum cleaner, filed for bankruptcy. The company will transfer all its assets to its Chinese manufacturing partner Picea. According to iRobot's press release, “This agreement represents an important step toward strengthening iRobot's financial foundation and positioning the company for long-term growth and innovation,” which sounds like the kind of thing you put in a press release when you're trying your best to put a positive spin on some really, really bad news.
This whole situation started back in August 2022 when iRobot announced US$1.7 billion acquisition by Amazon. Amazon's interest was obvious – some questionable hardware solutions left a company struggling to break into the home robotics market. And iRobot was at a point where it needed a new strategy to stay ahead of lower costs (and increasingly innovative ones) home robots from China.
Some people were skeptical about this acquisition, and admittedly I was one of them. My main concern was that iRobot would be acquired and effectively cease to exist, which usually happens with such acquisitions, but regulators in United States there were much more serious concerns: namely, that Amazon use your market power to limit competition. European Commission made similar objections.
By the end of January 2024 the deal fell throughiRobot laid off a third of its staff, suspended research and development, and its CEO and co-founder Colin Engle left the company. Since then, iRobot has seemed resigned to its fate, moving forward with only a few lackluster product announcements and little more. bankruptcy was a surprise to no one, perhaps least of all Angle.
iRobot bankruptcy and Amazon deal collapse
“iRobot's bankruptcy filing was really just the public outcome of a tragedy that happened a year and a half ago,” Engle said. IEEE spectrum on Monday. “Today sucks, but I've already mourned. I mourned when the Amazon deal was blocked for all the wrong reasons.” Engle notes that by the early 2020s, iRobot no longer monopolized the robot vacuum cleaner market. This was especially true in Europe, where iRobot's market share was 12 percent and falling. But from Engle's perspective, regulators were more focused on getting their point across big tech than about the real benefits and risks of a merger.
Co-founder Colin Engle says iRobot's bankruptcy filing was not a surprise after Amazon's failed acquisition a year and a half ago.Charles Krupa/AP
“We got killed on the road because of a larger agenda,” Engle says. “And this kind of regulation is incredibly destructive to the innovation economy. The whole concept of creating a technology company and having it acquired by a larger technology company is by far the most common positive outcome. Taking it away is not a good thing.” And for iRobot this was fatal.
A general criticism The thing about iRobot even before its attempted merger with Amazon is that the company was simply lagging behind in robot vacuum innovation, and Engle doesn't necessarily disagree with that. “By 2020, China had become the world's largest market for robot vacuum cleanerand Chinese robotics companies with government support, invested two or three times more in research and development than iRobot. We simply didn't have the capital to move as quickly as we wanted. For iRobot to continue to innovate and lead the industry, we needed to do so as part of a larger organization, and Amazon fit perfectly with our vision for the home.”
This situation is not unique to iRobot and exists serious problem in robotics on how companies can effectively compete with China's huge advantage in low-cost equipment manufacturing. In some ways, what happened to iRobot is an early symptom of what Angle (and others) see a fundamental problem with robotics in the United States: lack of government support. In China, long-term government support for robotics and embedded artificial intelligence (in the form of both policy and direct investment) can be found in industry and academia that neither the United States nor European Union was able to match. “Robotics is in global competition with some very formidable competitors,” Engle says. “We have to decide whether we want to support our innovation economy. And if the answer is negative, then the innovative economy goh somewhere else.”
The consequence of companies like iRobot losing this competition could be more than just bankruptcy. In the case of iRobot, the Chinese company now owns intellectual property and an application infrastructure that gives it access to data from millions of high-sensor autonomous devices. mobile robots in homes around the world. I asked Engle if Roomba owners should be concerned about this. “When I was running the company, we talked a lot about this and put a lot of effort into privacy and security,” he says. “That was the core of Roomba's design. Now I can't say what they'll prioritize.”
While Engle left iRobot and has since co-founded a more mysterious than we'd like company called Familiar machines and magiche remains adamant that what happened to iRobot should serve as a warning to robotics companies and policymakers alike. “Make no mistake: China is good at robots. So we need to play hard. We have a lot to learn from what we've done at iRobot, and there are many ways we can do it better.”
Personally, I prefer to remember the iRobot that was, not just the company that built a robot vacuum cleaner out of nothing and conquered the world with its help for almost two decades, but also the company that built PakBot save lives and also all these other crazy robots. I'm not sure there has ever been a company like iRobot, and there probably never will be again. It will be missed.
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