How iRobot got lost on his way home

There’s something painfully American about the story of iRobot, the company that taught vacuum cleaners to get around furniture. The company, founded in 1990 in Bedford, Mass., by MIT roboticist Rodney Brooks and his former students Colin Angle and Helen Greiner, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Sunday, ending a 35-year run that took it from the dreams of AI researchers to the floors of home kitchens and, finally, to the tender mercies of Chinese suppliers.

Brooks, the founding director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and a resident provocateur in the field of robotics, spent the ’80s observing insects and having an epiphany about how simple systems could produce complex behavior. By 1990, he leveraged these insights to create a company that would eventually sell more than 50 million robots. Launched in 2002, the Roomba became an unusual gadget that transcended its category to become a verb, a meme, and a much-amused cat transportation device.

Funding quickly followed, with the company raising a total of $38 million, including funding from Carlyle Group, and going public in an IPO in 2005, raising $103.2 million. By 2015, iRobot had gained enough momentum to launch its own venture arm, and TechCrunch sarcastically declared that “robot domination may have taken another step forward.” The plan at the time was to invest between $100,000 and $2 million in up to 10 seed and Series A robotics startups each year. It was a move that signaled the arrival of a moment when companies were successful enough to fund the next generation’s dreams.

Then came what looked like salvation. In 2022, Amazon agreed to acquire iRobot for $1.7 billion, making it Amazon’s fourth largest acquisition in history. In a press release announcing the news, Angle, who has served as CEO since the company’s founding, spoke of “creating innovative and practical products” and finding “a better place for our team to continue our mission.” It was like a fairy tale ending. This limp MIT spinoff was absorbed into Everything Store’s vast empire.

However, European regulators had other ideas. Indeed, amid threats to block the deal, Amazon believed it could eliminate rivals by restricting or degrading market access, Amazon and iRobot agreed to break the deal in January 2024, with Amazon paying a $94 million penalty and walking away. Mr. Angle resigned. The company’s stock plummeted. The company reduced its workforce by 31%.

What followed was a slow-motion collapse. Revenue had been declining since 2021 as supply chain disruptions and Chinese competitors flooded the market with cheaper robot vacuums. The Carlyle Group offered a $200 million lifeline in 2023, but in the end it only prolonged the inevitable. (The company ultimately sold the loan last month, perhaps at a discount, but declined to say which.)

This is the end of the company, at least the version that existed before. Shenzhen PICEA Robotics, iRobot’s main supplier and financier, will take control of the reorganized company. According to a release issued by iRobot on Sunday, the restructuring plan will allow iRobot to continue as a going concern and “continue business as usual without disruption to app functionality, customer programs, global partners, supply chain relationships, or ongoing product support.”

It also vowed to “fulfill our commitments to our employees and pay all outstanding amounts owed to our vendors and other creditors in a timely manner throughout this court-supervised proceeding.”

What this means for customers in the long term is another question, and we reached out to iRobot to ask. In the release, iRobot promises to continue supporting existing products during the rebuild. At the same time, the company’s legal disclosures acknowledge the uncertainties inherent in bankruptcy, including whether suppliers will survive, whether the process will go as planned, and whether the company will survive at all.

As The Verge pointed out last month in an article about iRobot’s woes, even if iRobot eventually goes bankrupt and shuts down its cloud services, customers’ Roomba vacuums won’t be reduced to useless packs. Physical controls should continue to work. Roomba owners can press a button to vacuum or tell it to go home.

Roomba owners will be missing out on everything that makes the device feel futuristic, including app-based scheduling, the ability to tell Roomba which rooms to clean, and voice commands to bark at Alexa while sprawled out on the couch.