After Roomba-maker iRobot filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last week, cofounder and former CEO Colin Angle did not shy away from sharing what went wrong.
Angle, who cofounded iRobot in 1990 alongside other members of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, said in a recent episode of the New York Times’ Hard Fork podcast that one of the core problems with remaining competitive in its market was growing Chinese competition.
“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,” Angle said. “I also think that the marketplace was not a level playing field.”
Roomba became a household name—and appliance—in numerous American homes after the vacuuming robot hit the market in 2002, a pioneer in the household robotics sector. The 2018 self-emptying Roomba i7+ vacuum was even able to tidy dust and detritus from specific rooms using mapping technology. The company reached its peak revenue in 2021 at nearly $1.6 billion. Now, following its bankruptcy filing, iRobot will be acquired by the China-based Picea Robotics, its primary manufacturer and lender.
Despite the Roomba’s initial success, it began losing market share to its Chinese rivals, a death knell for the company, according to Angle.
“For a small period of time, iRobot was the leading manufacturer of vacuuming robots in China,” he said. “Then it stopped, because China decided that this was a market of interest, and they were going to ensure that Chinese companies were advantaged to succeed there.”
Angle noted that China, “for various pragmatic and political reasons, gave a protected market to cut your teeth on for the competition,” such as the China-based Roborock, which put iRobot at a disadvantage in the massive Chinese market. (Roborock has since become the world’s largest robot vacuum brand.)
China has implemented a series of incentives for consumers to buy domestic products, including an up-to-20% discount on certain tech appliances, in an effort to boost spending following a prolonged pandemic-era lull. The Central Committee of the Chinese People’s Congress announced in October a renewed focus on bolstering domestic consumption, calling for support of Chinese businesses.
Picea Robotics, for its part, has dominated the robotic vacuums space, and it reports partnerships with Shark and Anker, in addition to iRobot.
“It’s a cage match, and it certainly got hard, and it got increasingly competitive,” Angle said.
iRobot did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
Obstacles in iRobot’s path
Increased competition from China may be why iRobot lost key international market share, but Angle said Amazon’s failed bid to acquire the company only hurt it.
In 2022, Amazon announced a deal to buy iRobot for $1.7 billion, what would have been its fourth-largest acquisition ever at the time. However, regulators thwarted the deal, with the European Union and U.S. Federal Trade Commission arguing Amazon could engage in anticompetitive practices by delisting competitors on its platform, or increasing advertising costs that would stymie innovation in the sector. Amazon and iRobot decided in January 2024 to abandon the deal.
To Angle, the failed acquisition hurt more than just iRobot, but rather the consumer and entire industry of household robotics.
“The tragedy of the blocking of the transaction is we did it to ourselves,” he said. “And 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.”
iRobot had other failures, such as a wet-mopping feature that lagged behind competitors and never really materialized, according to Angle, but regulator scrutiny of the proposed Amazon acquisition inhibited the American robotics sectors from being nurtured, he argued.
Amazon did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
“If nothing else, the tragedy of the events of the Amazon attempted acquisition of iRobot to serve as a lesson as we think about an industry which honestly could be 1,000 times larger than robot vacuuming,” Angle said.
