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When iRobot filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last Sunday<\/a>, it marked the end of an era for one of America\u2019s most beloved robotics companies. The Roomba maker, which had sold over 50 million robots since its 2002 launch, had survived 35 years of near-death experiences and technical challenges only to be undone by what founder Colin Angle calls \u201cavoidable\u201d regulatory opposition.<\/p>\n The collapse followed Amazon\u2019s January 2024 decision to scuttle<\/a> its $1.7 billion acquisition of iRobot after 18 months of investigation by the FTC and European regulators. In this candid conversation, Angle reflects on what he describes as a profoundly frustrating process, the chilling message it sends to entrepreneurs, and his determination to move forward with a new venture in consumer robotics. <\/p>\n This interview has been edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n TC: You called the bankruptcy \u201cavoidable\u201d and a \u201ctragedy for consumers.\u201d Walk me through what you think regulators got wrong in blocking the Amazon acquisition.<\/strong><\/p>\n CA: I think there\u2019s a real lesson around the role of the FTC and the European Commission. The goal, of course, is to avoid the abuses that can happen in monopolies and with the goal of protecting consumer choice and protecting innovation.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s trajectory was honestly different from where it was several years earlier. In the EU, we had a 12% market share [but it was] declining where the number one competitor was only three years old in the market, which is nearly the definition of a vibrant and dynamic marketplace. And in the United States, iRobot\u2019s market share was higher, but it was declining and there were multiple growing competitors bringing outside innovation into the marketplace.<\/p>\n This should have been a no-brainer. This should have been three, four weeks of investigation. 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.<\/p>\n Techcrunch event<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco<\/span> What was that 18-month process actually like? What were you being asked to do?<\/strong><\/p>\n The amount of money and time spent was indescribable. I would not be surprised if over 100,000 documents were created and delivered. iRobot invested a significant part of our discretionary earnings against fulfilling the requirements that went along with doing the transaction. Amazon was forced to invest many, many, many times that. There was a whole team, both internal and external employees and lawyers and economists working to try to, in as many different ways as possible \u2014 because it seemed like our message was falling on deaf ears \u2014 demonstrate that this acquisition was not going to create a monopolistic situation.<\/p>\n There was daily activity for 18 months associated with this. Perhaps most telling, when I was testifying as part of being deposed, I had a chance to walk the halls of the FTC. The examiners on their office doors had printouts of deals blocked, like trophies.<\/p>\n Trophies?<\/strong><\/p>\n To me, it felt so wrong as an entrepreneur who started this thing literally in my living room and lived six and a half years never having enough money in the bank to make payroll, finally making it through succeeding. Here\u2019s an agency whose stated mission is protecting consumer interests and helping the United States economy, celebrating as victories every time they shut down M&A, which in a very real way is the primary driver of value creation for the innovation economy.<\/p>\n I went into this deposition looking for a friend. It\u2019s like, \u201cHere we are, we\u2019re obviously not in a stronger place, and here\u2019s a great opportunity for us. Are you excited for us?\u201d Maybe this is just my na\u00efve take coming out, but that\u2019s not the reception I got. It was, \u201cWhy should we ever let them do this?\u201d It\u2019s like: because it\u2019s good for the consumer \u2014 because it\u2019s going to catalyze innovation.<\/p>\n How do you think what happened here changes the calculus for startup founders who see acquisition as their exit strategy? Do you think we\u2019re in a world where American tech companies can\u2019t scale through M&A?<\/strong><\/p>\n Risk has a chilling effect. If you\u2019re an entrepreneur, your only option is to hope that it doesn\u2019t happen again. The reason you and I are talking is I hope by my words I can make it less likely that it will happen again.<\/p>\n I founded a new company and my outlook on exit strategy and even commercialization strategy is impacted by the experiences I had at iRobot. How can it not be? That precedent creates risk of it happening again, and only through positive experiences do we start to dial down the anxiety that the exits I\u2019m depending on \u2014 or as a venture capitalist, the exits I\u2019m investing in assuming will happen \u2014 will actually come through. That risk is factored into the willingness to invest, the valuation of deals, and the rate of new company formation.<\/p>\n It\u2019s hard to say there\u2019s X percent fewer entrepreneurial starts or exits as a result of the chilling message, but it certainly didn\u2019t help. Entrepreneurs can use every leg up that we as a nation can provide. It is a rugged journey. When it actually works out, it should be a celebration. The FTC is there as a safeguard against very real examples of things gone too far. I\u2019m a big believer in checks and balances. But when things get out of whack, the country suffers.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s talk about iRobot\u2019s journey. The Roomba didn\u2019t come out for 12 years after the company was founded. Tell me about those early days.<\/strong><\/p>\n iRobot was a bunch of people in an academic lab saying, \u201cWe were promised robots. Where are the robots?\u201d If I could be pissed off that I don\u2019t have the robots we were promised, I should do something about it. If not us, who? If not now, when?<\/p>\n One of the co-founders, my professor Rod Brooks, had pioneered an AI technology which allowed the embedding of machine intelligence in low-cost robotics. The mission of the company was to build cool stuff, deliver a great product, have fun, make money, and change the world.<\/p>\n The first business plan was \u201cprivate mission to the moon, sell the movie rights.\u201d We were maybe the first company to fail to do exactly that. But the technology we developed led to additions to the Mars Pathfinder mission \u2014 my name\u2019s up on Mars. We built robots that went into the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon disaster. We built the PackBot, which was the first robot ever deployed in a combat mission for the US Army, went into caves in Afghanistan, and became the primary methodology for diffusing improvised explosive devices. We would get postcards: \u201cYou saved my life today.\u201d<\/p>\n When the Fukushima disaster happened, we donated half a million dollars worth of robots to Japan. We sent six people over to train Tokyo Electric Power Company employees. Those robots were the first inside the reactor doors, mapped out radiation levels, and found a path where an employee could run in, get to the control room, work for a minute and a half, run back out, and only receive a lifetime dose of radiation. We were credited with enabling the shutdown of the reactor.<\/p>\n And then year 12, the Roomba?<\/strong><\/p>\n I had a team that was working on toys, and one of the guys said, \u201cColin, I think it\u2019s time we can do this. We can finally make the vacuum.\u201d I\u2019m like, \u201cOkay, here\u2019s $15,000. Two weeks. See what you can do.\u201d Two weeks later they came back and said, \u201cHey, that\u2019s not bad. Maybe there\u2019s something here.\u201d We scraped and found a little bit of money [to build these]. A year and a half later, I convinced my board that we could build 10,000 of these robots and we launched them.<\/p>\n It\u2019s really the media that picked up the story. We had no money for marketing. Reporters were fascinated because we tended to do interesting things that were real, and they couldn\u2019t believe that robot vacuuming could possibly be real. [The reaction was:] \u201cMy God, it actually worked.\u201d We ended up selling 70,000 robots in the first three months. Then we nearly went out of business the next year.<\/p>\n Because you couldn\u2019t accommodate demand?<\/strong><\/p>\n Because we screwed up. The press drove this huge initial demand \u2014 70,000 robots. So next year we\u2019re going to do four times that. We made 300,000 robots. We even made a television commercial, but we were a bunch of geek engineers, so it totally failed. After Cyber Monday we were sitting with 250,000 robots in our warehouse like, \u201cOh my God, the world\u2019s going to end.\u201d<\/p>\n Then something good happened. The guy running our website said, \u201cWhy did sales quadruple yesterday?\u201d We hadn\u2019t done anything. What had happened was Pepsi had started running a TV ad with Dave Chappelle. He walks into this beautiful home, picks up a potato chip, and a Roomba comes out. He\u2019s like, \u201cA vacuum cleaner!\u201d He throws down the potato chip, the vacuum eats it, then chases him. His pants are ripped off. He stands up in boxers. A beautiful woman appears, and he says, \u201cYour vacuum cleaner ate my pants.\u201d We sold 250,000 robots in two weeks and realized we knew nothing about marketing.<\/p>\n Wow! You had no idea Pepsi was incorporating your product into its commercial?<\/strong><\/p>\n No idea. It was wild. You try to do good for so long and you get smacked in the face so many times, and then sometimes something good happens. You could say because of that crazy moment in time, we have robots. When we think about just how fragile a journey it is \u2014 cats riding Roombas<\/a> was a big part of why we succeeded. Does that make any sense? No, not at all. But we certainly didn\u2019t expect tens of billions of views of cats riding Roombas.<\/p>\n At some point you started seeing Chinese competitors like Roborock and Ecovacs adopting lidar navigation years before iRobot. Why did you stick with vision-based navigation for so long?<\/strong><\/p>\n We explicitly did not put lasers on the robot. We had the technology decades ago because it\u2019s a dead-end technology. Under my strategic direction, we were going to invest every penny of cost against a vision-based nav and situational understanding system. Your Tesla does not have a laser on it. It is all vision-based. At least Elon agrees with me.<\/p>\n Our strategic plan was for Roomba to be much more than just a vacuum cleaner in the home. To do that, it needs to understand more. Lasers are not advanced technology \u2014 they\u2019ve been around for decades. They\u2019re an expedient solution to a subset of the problems that a robot at home needs to take on. A laser will never tell you whether you actually cleaned the floor or not.<\/p>\n It is absolutely true that Chinese competition was coming in at lower price points. We were late in building a two-in-one robot \u2014 we believed that by separating mopping and vacuuming you could give a better customer experience. The customer voted that we were wrong, and that\u2019s okay. We certainly were first in auto-evac, first in navigation. We were also importantly excluded from the Chinese marketplace, which is the largest market for consumer robotics in the world. That didn\u2019t help.<\/p>\n What learnings from your iRobot experience would you share with other robotics entrepreneurs?<\/strong><\/p>\n The first thing I tell all robotics entrepreneurs is: make sure you understand your market so that you are building something that delivers more value than it costs to create. Robots are so exciting, so sexy that it\u2019s really easy to convince yourself that you\u2019re doing something that is going to change the world, if only consumers were smart enough to realize it. That\u2019s a pretty tough equation.<\/p>\n Technology is oftentimes in the robot space well ahead of the business plans that can take advantage of the technology. One of the traps is thinking of robotics as a thing as opposed to a toolkit. As soon as you say, \u201cI\u2019m going to build a robot,\u201d and head off building your humanoid \u2014 are you really doing it because you understand a problem you\u2019re trying to solve, or are you enamored with building your thing?<\/p>\n When I started iRobot, it was just assumed that robots were going to vacuum floors by building humanoids to push upright vacuum cleaners. When we first built Roomba, we would ask people, \u201cIs that a robot?\u201d People would say, \u201cNo, that\u2019s not a robot. A robot has arms and legs and a head.\u201d Yet Roomba at the time cost 10,000 times less than a humanoid pushing an upright vacuum.<\/p>\n The challenge of entrepreneurship is breaking through the romance and opportunity and falling in love with your technology and getting to the application that you\u2019re trying to solve. Understand your consumer, understand the problem you\u2019re trying to solve \u2014 because it\u2019s complicated, robotics is expensive, and it takes a lot of energy to get right.<\/p>\n You mentioned you\u2019ve founded a new company<\/a>. What can you tell me about it?<\/strong><\/p>\n We\u2019re in stealth mode, but I\u2019ll give you a broad hint. It\u2019s consumer-facing. We\u2019re really looking at the fact that most of the things robots can do to meet outstanding needs require us to interact with other people. So how do we build a robot that actually has sufficient emotional sophistication \u2014 not human-level, but enough \u2014 to build an enduring co-character that can make sense over time and use that for health and wellness related applications?<\/p>\n It\u2019s going to be awesome. I\u2019m so excited about it. It\u2019s given me enthusiasm and energy to have a chance to use this new toolkit and continue on my journey to build the robots we were promised. I really haven\u2019t changed that much from a grad student in college saying, \u201cOh my God, we\u2019ve been promised robots and we don\u2019t have the ones that I want yet.\u201d I spent 30 years focused on building the world\u2019s greatest floor care robot, and now I have a chance to do something else.<\/p>\n For more from this interview with Angle, including his take on whether humanoid robots will ever work, check out TechCrunch\u2019s StrictlyVC Download<\/a> podcast \u2014 new episodes drop every Tuesday, and the full conversation will be available soon<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n