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iRobot

Consumer roboticsUSA
💀 Dead / Bankrupt
Peak $5 BillionToday
~-98%
from peak
  1. 🦄
    Became a unicorn
    2015
  2. 📈
    Peak valuation
    $5 Billion ’21
  3. 💔
    Became a Unitard
    2024
  4. 💸
    Last valuation
    Wiped out
🔥 Raised & burned
$35M
Total raised
$2.82K/day
Burned · 34.1y alive
Funding: Crunchbase / company history
Current status
Amazon's $1.7B acquisition collapsed (Jan 2024); going-concern warning; filed for bankruptcy and is being acquired by China's Picea Robotics.

How it happened

iRobot created the consumer robot-vacuum category with the Roomba, its market value reaching about $5B in 2021. It agreed to a $1.7B Amazon takeover in 2022, but the deal was terminated in January 2024 after the EU signaled it would block it. Glassdoor reviews say employees treated that deal as an all-or-nothing bet; when it collapsed, roughly half the company was laid off and the best engineers left. Insiders had long faulted risk-averse leadership for falling behind cheaper Chinese rivals as the product line dwindled to rebadged supplier bots. It issued a going-concern warning and, with no buyer, filed for bankruptcy — sold to Chinese contract manufacturer Picea Robotics for a fraction of its value.

Employee accounts paraphrase anonymous, unverified reviews posted publicly on Glassdoor ↗. See our methodology.

Source: TechCrunch / SEC / FTC (peak market cap ~$5B 2021; Amazon $1.7B deal terminated Jan 2024 over EU antitrust; going-concern warning; filed bankruptcy and agreed to be acquired by Shenzhen Picea Robotics)

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