from Hacker News

Amazon and iRobot call off their planned acquisition

by bitsage on 1/29/24, 1:59 PM with 450 comments

  • by nerdjon on 1/29/24, 7:06 PM

    I have some conflicting feelings on this, the CEO stepping down and the layoffs as soon as this was announced makes it seem like this was/is a company on the verge of shutdown or at least having serious problems.

    At what point should an acquisition be allowed on the sake of something being able to continue to exist and possibly save jobs? Sure there would have almost guaranteed be job cuts with the acquisition due to redundancy, but would it have been the same amount?

    However on the flip side, it feels like iRobot has been stagnating for years and entering some weird categories. I still fail to see why they entered the air purifier market and them selling a stick vacuum next to their iRobot is sure one way to say "our expensive robot doesn't do everything we claim it does".

    I finally ditched my iRobot for a Roborock a couple months ago and it's been amazing. It is shocking how much better it is, when it was in the middle of a clean and I could tell it to go start a different clean and it just did it? It didn't complain or anything, I shouldn't be surprised by this but after the experience with iRobot feeling like it stands in my way every time this felt like magic.

    It genuinely makes me sad to see iRobot not be what they used to be, it feels like they got complacent with Roomba.

  • by paxys on 1/29/24, 5:53 PM

    I can't help but feel that a lot of these large companies are choosing not to fight regulatory agencies over acquisitions because after the recent tech correction the targets are now worth a lot less than what they bid for them (similar to Elon trying to get out of buying Twitter). Easier to pay the break-up fee and move on.

  • by pwnna on 1/29/24, 3:27 PM

    The progressive loss in consumer robotics company in the West to their Chinese counter parts has been disappointing. Much like drones, I suspect this is short sighted as the underlying technology eventually have national security concerns.

    Now maybe these companies are likely just mismanaged and the cost of North American engineering is too high? That said, it still seems like there is a structural problem here that very few hybrid software-hardware companies succeed.

  • by hmottestad on 1/29/24, 11:25 PM

    I hope iRobot manages to survive. I have one of their J9 robots with a camera and object detection. It’s amazing how it can vacuum our toy-riddled floor.

    I’m very weary of buying a robot vacuum with a camera from a Chinese company. I don’t fully trust iRobot, but I trust them much more than I trust Chinese brands.

    I also couldn’t see myself going back to a robot vacuum without a camera. After I got kids our old Neato vacuum robot got very little use since it always required that everything was picked up off the floor.

    That being said I’m quite frustrated by my new J9. It’s supposed to have a feature called SmartScrub, but it’s not in the app. The robot is also supposed to drive back to the base to refill its water tank, but it hasn’t done that a single time since we bought it a month ago. The combination of vacuuming and mopping is also a bit unfortunate since it sucks up a lot of humid air when passing over areas that it’s already mopped, causing a buildup of wet-ish dirt in the air duct.

  • by fhub on 1/29/24, 8:34 PM

    Roborock seems to be eating iRobot's lunch. Which I find fascinating as the now ex-CEO of iRobot is was so cocky about avoiding using lasers (LIDAR) for navigation and sticking to cameras only (which had a real privacy issue). See this interview with Lex Fridman https://youtu.be/1d9Dj9dT_pw?si=j8CbM7GgRMm6Mu0m&t=1362. Lex pushes him on LIDAR and he doubles down on camera only. "Vision is the future, I can say that without reservation"

  • by encoderer on 1/29/24, 5:44 PM

    Europe, where the largest business is a luxury handbag company, has now essentially declared acquisitions illegal, and is eagerly regulating American tech companies after completely failing in developing their own tech sector.

  • by Animats on 1/29/24, 8:27 PM

    Another Rod Brooks company.

    * Lucid - bankrupt. Nobody really needed another LISP startup.

    * Rethink Robotics - bankrupt. Their "cobots" were not very useful.

    * iRobot - in trouble.

    Amazon and iRobot had some integration. "Alexa, tell Roomba to vacuum in front of the counter", says the iRobot site. Did that actually work?

    It made more sense for Amazon, giving Amazon a mobile spy in everyone's house. Amazon's last attempt at that, their indoor drone, never shipped.[1]

    [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2jFN_QEcS4

  • by kklisura on 1/29/24, 7:23 PM

    To me this all seems warranted. Please read the European Commission report [1]:

    > On 6 July 2023, the Commission opened an in-depth investigation to assess if Amazon's acquisition of iRobot may

    > (i) restrict competition in the market for the manufacturing and supply of RVCs; and

    > (ii) allow Amazon to strengthen its position in the market for online marketplace services to third-party sellers (and related advertising services) and/or other data-related markets.

    > As a result of this in-depth investigation, the Commission is concerned that Amazon may restrict competition in the European Economic Area (‘EEA')-wide and/or national markets for RVCs, by hampering rival RVC suppliers' ability to effectively compete.

    [1] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_...

  • by bearjaws on 1/29/24, 4:28 PM

    Adam Connover interviewed the chair of the FTC, and it was a pretty good pod cast episode.

    The key insight I took away was, the FTC doesn't want to approve M&A from large cap corporations, period.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4UkMad4JQk

  • by JoshGlazebrook on 1/29/24, 7:31 PM

    iRobot and their Roomba product line is riding on their namesake only. Roborock and other competitors are miles ahead of them when it comes to technology. It took a top of the line Roomba from 2021 about 4 hours to fully map my downstairs. Meanwhile the top of the line Roborock from 2022 did it in 15 minutes with its Lidar. And this is just one example. My roborock literally mops, cleans and dries its own mop, refills itself, empties itself, I can two way video call with the damn thing, it's just insane.

    iRobot has not innovated their products in any meaningful way in over a decade.

  • by bequanna on 1/29/24, 5:41 PM

    Have their vacuum models improved? When I was in the market about an year ago, it seemed that Chinese robot vacuums were light years ahead.

    I have a few iRobot vacuums that are several years old and never get used due to ineffectiveness. It is easier to spend 5 minutes manually vacuuming vs letting the iRobot wander around randomly for an hour and still not clean well.

  • by israrkhan on 1/29/24, 6:09 PM

    EU regulators would rather see a company go bankrupt than getting acquired at 3x market cap.

  • by esel2k on 1/29/24, 6:58 PM

    So after neato announced bankruptcy now iRobot will? That leaves the market all for china?

  • by happyopossum on 1/29/24, 10:26 PM

    > Our in-depth investigation preliminarily showed that the acquisition of iRobot would have enabled Amazon to foreclose iRobot’s rivals by restricting or degrading access to the Amazon Stores

    Seems like the EC just declared that Amazon is no longer allowed to make any acquisitions of companies that make products. At the very least they left a pretty high bar for Amazon to get over for any future acquisitions.

  • by paxys on 1/29/24, 5:55 PM

    I can't help but feel that a lot of these large companies are choosing not to fight regulatory agencies over acquisitions because after the recent tech correction the targets are now worth a lot less than what they bid for them (similar to Elon trying to get out of buying Twitter). Easier to pay the break-up fee and move on.

  • by Solvency on 1/29/24, 6:24 PM

    Roombas are a joke. My house is one floor. Engineered flat hardwood. A few low pile flag rugs. The best model Roomba just EATS them on the corners, dragging them around the room, getting stuck and causing chaos. It's 2024. We all don't live in carpeted 70s.

  • by waterheater on 1/29/24, 9:22 PM

    I worked at iRobot some years back. I'll tell you exactly why iRobot is struggling: iRobot, at its core, built robots.

    Does that seem contradictory? Consider that their innovations, what they're known for, lies in robotic morphology. iRobot's Cool Stuff Museum in their HQ has some groundbreaking robots which still are awesome (like a ocean buoy robot powered by the waves). They cut their teeth doing research grants and developing military robots. Their ethos was rooted in service; when 9/11 happened, they packed up a prototype robot and drove to Ground Zero to use that robot to search for survivors in the rubble. Still, their military robots were controlled by humans, and the original Roombas turned at random angles to fully clean a room.

    Around 8 years ago, iRobot spun off their military and commercial robot divisions into independent companies (Endeavor Robotics and Ava Robotics, respectively; Endeavor was eventually acquired by FLIR) to focus exclusively on the consumer market. The consumer robotics industry was shifting, so iRobot needed to change. They bought Evolution Robotics to acquire computer vision IP and started doing research in that area. Advanced software capabilities were now important, so they shipped vSLAM (monocular SLAM representing state using pose graphs; they've published quite a few papers on this), persistent mapping, automatic room segmentation, and much more. They kept researching new consumer robots, including a home security robot which didn't make it out of the lab.

    The thing is, consumer robots will ALWAYS be a luxury item. Nobody NEEDS a Roomba, and the iRobot folks understood that reality. So, iRobot leaned into that and worked to make the Roomba the premium option: a refined industrial design language with their main products appealed better to the high-end market, and they released an autoevac Roomba. I'm guessing that their primary market segment saturated, so they figured they'd release new physical products, but that puts them in direct competition with Dyson (who utterly failed to produce a good robot vacuum cleaner, mind you), so good luck there. I don't believe iRobot ever resorted to selling their customer data, which I'm sure Chinese robotics companies regularly do to increase revenue.

    I also think iRobot's failure to launch their robot lawnmower really hurt them, probably hurting morale than anything else. Tons of people worked on that project, and the technology stack was genuinely impressive for seven years ago (using UWB beacons placed in the yard for localization and mapping). UWB was still an emerging technology in 2017 (still a few years before AirTags released). It makes me sad they couldn't ship it in the US, since the technology was better than virtually all other robot lawnmowers on the market.

    iRobot manufactures their robots in China, but if I remember correctly, that's exclusively because the Chinese restrict exports on key electrical components like resistors. There was a desire to onshore manufacturing, but because the Chinese cornered the market, it was basically impossible to make the costs work out.

    The bottom line is, the robot vacuum market is basically a solved problem, and there's a very good reason that floor cleaning robots continue to be the only viable consumer robot product.

    I have fond memories of those good and kind iRoboteers. I wish iRobot all the best as they move forward and try to find a well-constrained everyday problem which can be solved by a low-cost robot.

  • by kromenak on 1/29/24, 9:59 PM

    I got a Roomba to replace an Eufy, assuming it’d be better because it was more expensive.

    Well, it was not! It had similar effectiveness to the Eufy, but lacked manual controls. It also refused to go places the Eufy would (like a dark carpet) and constantly tried to return home after only a cursory clean.

    That kind of turned me off on Roomba. Not saying this is why they might be having trouble, but it reflects my experience and feelings toward them.

  • by unboxingelf on 1/29/24, 7:35 PM

  • by latchkey on 1/29/24, 7:09 PM

  • by spangry on 1/30/24, 1:36 AM

    Maybe an opportunity for OpenAI to acquire a robot vacuum company on the cheap. Seems like an easy way to gain access to tonnes of physical sensor and movement data to integrate into a giant multimodal model.

  • by bagavi on 1/29/24, 11:43 PM

    https://maticrobots.com/

    Has anyone heard about them? It apparently offers complete privacy by doing all computes on device.

  • by CatWChainsaw on 2/3/24, 6:01 PM

    I hope this new era of trust-busting grows at the same exponential rate Big Tech drooled over.

  • by Tempest1981 on 1/30/24, 3:52 AM

    Do we know what Amazon had planned for iRobot?

    Might it have included the same significant layoffs, or OEMing cheaper Chinese hardware while keeping the brand?

  • by lulznews on 1/30/24, 2:54 AM

    All these American companies do is slap a logo on Chinese products and mark up by 3-10x. Amazon of all places should know this.

  • by epa on 1/29/24, 7:53 PM

    Governments giving large companies a bigger moat..

  • by whatever1 on 1/29/24, 7:14 PM

    Does irobot get compensated for this failed deal?

  • by cdme on 1/29/24, 7:10 PM

    Less consolidation is good. Layoffs suck.

  • by saos on 1/29/24, 8:43 PM

    Amazon really cutting costs now.

  • by PaulHoule on 1/29/24, 2:51 PM

    (To parody the email that I get from every startup that got bought by FAANG)

    “As a consumer I am proud, delighted and outright tickled pink that this acquisition has failed as having competition in the market will, in the long term, result in better products and lower prices”

    See https://www.thebignewsletter.com/

  • by thrillgore on 1/29/24, 2:28 PM

    I know the EU gets a lot of hate on HN, but its clear they're the last force on Earth trying to actively save it from the woes of unchecked capitalism.

  • by cheriot on 1/29/24, 6:42 PM

    Did Amazon ever explain why they even wanted this acquisition? I don't think iRobot has tech they need for wear house automation.

    Is it about owning every home device? Maybe they'll turn the vacuum into a security robot to integrate with Ring /s

  • by CaptainZapp on 1/29/24, 6:05 PM

    > David Zapolsky, the Amazon general counsel, said: “Undue and disproportionate regulatory hurdles discourage entrepreneurs, who should be able to see acquisition as one path to success, and that hurts both consumers and competition – the very things that regulators say they’re trying to protect.”

    Are those people for real?

    Mr. Zapolsky may want to seek out a new career...

    In comedy.