If there’s one lesson iRobot founder Colin Angle took from the company’s bankruptcy, it’s never to underestimate competitors.
On December 14, iRobot, maker of the popular robotic vacuum Roomba, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and will be acquired by its primary contract manufacturer, Chinese company Picea Robotics.
Angle said one of his biggest takeaways as iRobot enters its next phase is that even market leaders must remain alert to competition from China.
“It’s certainly the advent of this new type of competitor, the Chinese fast follower, who had access to the Chinese marketplace, which iRobot effectively did not,” he said on the tech podcast “Hard Fork” on Friday.
iRobot was founded in 1990 by Angle, Helen Greiner, and Rodney Brooks — roboticists at MIT — who had a “vision of making practical robots a reality,” the company says on its website. It released its popular robot vacuum, Roomba, in 2002, which effectively created the category of consumer robotics.
For the next two decades, Angle said that the company grew the category and, for a brief period, was the leading manufacturer of vacuuming robots in China. The company reached its peak revenue in 2021, at $1.56 billion.
In the years that followed, however, Angle said the home robotics market was upended by new entrants from China, such as Roborock, which had been chipping away at iRobot’s dominance since its arrival in 2018. Other Chinese competitors include Dreame, Ecovacs, and Shar.
Angle said that companies like Roborock had an advantage against iRobot because they had a “protected market to cut your teeth on for the competition.”
China made several moves to ensure that Chinese manufacturers in the category had an advantage by providing direct subsidies to iRobot’s competitors, Angle said.
Over the past few years, China has made significant strides toward becoming a global hub for robotics innovation and adoption, rolling out multiple strategic plans across several sectors. As part of those efforts, the government has subsidized robot purchases at an average rate of about 17.5% of equipment costs, according to the Asian Robotics Review.
In some cases, iRobot’s features simply lagged behind its competitors.
“Honestly, we got wet mopping wrong,” he said. Scuba, iRobot’s mopping robot, never took off as an independent product.
“It certainly got hard, and it got increasingly competitive,” Angle said. “Ultimately, we were open to other strategies to enable us to continue to innovate.”
One of those was striking a deal with Amazon, which attempted to acquire the company for $1.4 billion, but the deal was terminated following an antitrust review by the Federal Trade Commission and European regulators.
“The Commission’s probe focused on Amazon’s ability and incentive to favor its own products and disfavor rivals, and associated effects on innovation, entry barriers, and consumer privacy,” the FTC said in a statement in 2024. “The Commission’s investigation revealed significant concerns about the transaction’s potential competitive effects.”
Angle said the deal should have been a “no-brainer” in a recent interview with TechCrunch.
“What happened was that iRobot and Amazon came together for the expressed purpose of creating more innovation, more consumer choice, at a time when iRobot’s trajectory was honestly different from where it was several years earlier,” he told TechCrunch.
He said the FTC and the European Commission’s investigation should not have gone longer than three or four weeks.
“What happened instead was a year and a half of pendency, which had a very challenging impact on the ability to operate a company and ultimately having the acquisition blocked,” he said.
He said iRobot should serve as a cautionary tale for the future of US manufacturing.
“The net result, which, I have argued, was done with eyes wide open, was putting the consumer robot industry in a box, gift-wrapping it, and handing it to someone else,” he told “Hard Fork.”
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