Why the iRobot Bankruptcy Didn’t Surprise Ex-CEO[🤖🇺🇸]

On Sunday evening, the legendary robotics company iRobot, manufacturer of the Roomba robotic vacuum, filed for bankruptcy. The company will be handing over all of its assets to its Chinese manufacturing partner, Picea. According to iRobot’s press release, “this agreement represents a critical step toward strengthening iRobot’s financial foundation and positioning the Company for long-term growth and innovation,” which sounds like the sort of thing that you put in a press release when you’re trying your best to put a positive spin on really, really bad news.

This whole situation started back in August 2022, when iRobot announced a US $1.7 billion acquisition by Amazon. Amazon’s interest was obvious—some questionable hardware decisions had left the company struggling to enter the home robotics market. And iRobot was at a point where it needed a new strategy to keep ahead of lower-cost (and increasingly innovative) home robots from China.

Some folks were skeptical of this acquisition, and admittedly, I was one of them. My primary worry was that iRobot would get swallowed up and effectively cease to exist, which tends to happen with acquisitions like these, but regulators in the United States had much more pointed concerns: namely, that Amazon would leverage its marketplace power to restrict competition. The European Commission expressed similar objections.

By late January 2024, the deal had fallen through, iRobot laid off a third of its staff, suspended research and development, and CEO and cofounder Colin Angle left the company. Since then, iRobot has seemed resigned to its fate, coasting along on a few lackluster product announcements and not much else, and so Sunday’s announcement of bankruptcy was a surprise to no one—perhaps least of all to Angle.

iRobot’s Bankruptcy and Amazon Deal Collapse

“iRobot’s bankruptcy filing was really just a public-facing outcome of the tragedy that happened a year and a half ago,” Angle told IEEE Spectrum on Monday. “Today sucks, but I’ve already mourned. I mourned when the deal with Amazon got blocked for all the wrong reasons.” Angle points out that by the early 2020s, iRobot was no longer monopolizing the robot-vacuum market. This was especially true in Europe, where iRobot’s market share was 12 percent and decreasing. But from Angle’s perspective, regulators were more focused on making a point about Big Tech than they were about the actual merits and risks of the merger.

Cofounder Colin Angle says that iRobot’s bankruptcy filing was unsurprising after a failed acquisition by Amazon a year and a half ago.Charles Krupa/AP

“We were roadkilled in a larger agenda,” Angle says. “And this kind of regulation is incredibly destructive to the innovation economy. The whole concept of starting a tech company and having it acquired by a bigger tech company is far and away the most common positive outcome. For that to be taken away is not a good thing.” And for iRobot, it was fatal.

A common criticism of iRobot even before the attempted Amazon merger is that the company was simply being out-innovated in the robot-vacuum space, and Angle doesn’t necessarily disagree. “By 2020, China had become the largest market in the world for robot vacuums, and Chinese robotics companies with government support were investing two or three times as much as iRobot was in R&D. We simply didn’t have the capital to move as quickly as we wanted to. In order for iRobot to continue to innovate and lead the industry, we needed to do so as part of a larger entity, and Amazon was very aligned with our vision for the home.”

This situation is not unique to iRobot, and there is significant concern in robotics about how companies can effectively compete against the massive advantage that China has in the production of low-cost hardware. In some sense, what happened to iRobot is an early symptom of what Angle (and others) see as a fundamental problem with robotics in the United States: lack of government support. In China, long-term government support for robotics and embodied AI (in the form of both policy and direct investment) can be found across industry and academia, something that neither the United States nor the European Union has been able to match. “Robotics is in a global competition against some very fearsome competitors,” Angle says. “We have to decide whether we want to support our innovation economy. And if the answer is no, then the innovation economy goes elsewhere.”

The consequence of companies like iRobot losing this competition can be more than just bankruptcy. In iRobot’s case, a Chinese company now owns iRobot’s intellectual property and app infrastructure, which gives it access to data from millions of highly sensorized autonomous mobile robots in homes across the world. I asked Angle whether or not 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. “This was fundamental to Roomba’s design. Now, I can’t speak to what they’ll prioritize.”

While Angle has moved on from iRobot, and has since cofounded a more-mysterious-than-we’d-like company called Familiar Machines and Magic, he still feels strongly that what has happened to iRobot should be a warning to both robotics companies and policymakers. “Make no mistake: China is good at robots. So we need to play this hard. There’s a lot to learn from what we did at iRobot, and a lot of ways to do it better.”

On a personal note, I’m choosing to remember the iRobot that was—not just the company that built a robot vacuum out of nothing and conquered the world with it for nearly two decades, but also the company that built the PackBot to save lives, as well as all of these other crazy robots. I’m not sure there’s ever been a company quite like iRobot, and there may never be again. It will be missed.