How iRobot Lost Its Way Home | TechCrunch

There’s something painfully American about the arc of iRobot, the company that taught your vacuum cleaner to navigate the furniture. Founded in 1990 in Bedford, Massachusetts by MIT roboticist Rodney Brooks and his former students Colin Angle and Helen Greiner, the company filed for bankruptcy on Sunday, ending a 35-year run that took it from the dreams of AI researchers to your kitchen floor and eventually to the tender mercies of its Chinese supplier.

Brooks, the founder and director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and resident robotics provocateur, spent the 1980s watching insects and have revelations about how simple systems can cause complex behavior. By 1990, he had translated those insights into a company that would eventually sell more than 50 million robots. Launched in 2002, the Roomba became the rare gadget that transcended its category and became a verb, a meme and, to the amusement of many, a cat transporter.

The money soon followed, with the company raising a total of $38 million, including from The Carlyle Group, before going public in a 2005 initial public offering that raised $103.2 million. In 2015, iRobot was good enough to launch its own venture, prompting TechCrunch to wryly declare that “robot dominance may have just taken another step forward.” The plan at the time was to invest $100,000 to $2 million each year in up to ten seed and Series A robotics startups. It was the kind of step that marks the arrival of a company, the moment when you are successful enough to finance the dreams of the next generation.

Then came what seemed like redemption. In 2022, Amazon agreed to acquire iRobot for $1.7 billion, which would have been Amazon’s fourth-largest acquisition ever. In one press release Announcing the news, Angle, who has been CEO since the company’s founding, spoke of “creating innovative, practical products” and finding “a better place for our team to continue our mission.” It seemed like a fairytale ending: MIT’s sleazy spinoff was absorbed into the sprawling Everything Store empire.

However, European regulators had different ideas. Amid threats they would block the deal — they believed Amazon could exclude rivals by limiting or worsening access to its market — Amazon and iRobot agreed to kill the deal in January 2024, with Amazon paying a $94 million termination fee and walking away. Hoek has resigned. The company’s shares plummeted. It lost 31% of its workforce.

What followed next was a slow-motion collapse. Profits have fallen since 2021 thanks to supply chain chaos and Chinese competitors flooding the market with cheaper robot vacuums. The Carlyle Group, which provided a $200 million lifeline in 2023, ultimately only prolonged the inevitable. (Finally sold that loan last month – probably at a discount, although it didn’t say either way.)

At least now it’s over the version of the company that existed before. Shenzhen PICEA Robotics, iRobot’s main supplier and lender, will take control of the reorganized company. According to one edition The restructuring plan, released by iRobot on Sunday, allows iRobot to remain a going concern and “continue to operate as normal without anticipated disruption to app functionality, customer programs, global partners, supply chain relationships or continued product support.”

It also pledged to “fulfill its obligations to employees and make timely and full payments to vendors and other creditors for amounts due during the court-supervised process.”

What this means for customers in the longer term is another question, one we asked iRobot. In the release, iRobot promises to continue supporting existing products during the restructuring; At the same time, the legal revelations acknowledge the inherent uncertainties of bankruptcy – whether suppliers survive, whether the process proceeds as planned, whether the company survives at all.

As The Verge noted in a story about iRobot’s troubles last monthEven if iRobot eventually collapses and takes its cloud services with it, customers’ Roomba vacuums won’t become useless pucks. The physical controls should continue to work – a Roomba owner would still be able to press the button to send it away to vacuum or tell it to go home.

What Roomba owners would lose is everything that makes the devices feel futuristic, including app-based scheduling, the ability to tell which rooms to clean, and voice commands. barked at Alexa while you’re stretched out on the couch.