“It’s certainly the advent of this new type of competitor, the Chinese fast follower who had access to the Chinese marketplace, which I Robot 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 meeting 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.”
“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.
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.
