Consumer Robotics Company Anki Shuts Down

Barely an hour ago, Recode broke the news that Anki, the consumer robotics company behind both Vector, Cozmo, and Overdrive, will be terminating several hundred employees and shutting down on Wednesday after it failed to secure a new round of financing at the end of last week. Despite having sold more than 1.5 million robots (hundreds of thousands of which were Cozmos) as of late last year, it wasn’t enough “to support a hardware and software business and bridge to our long-term product roadmap,” Anki said in a statement sent to press today. Until today, we’d been feeling like Anki was a robotics company that we could point to and say, “Look, they’re building consumer robot hardware that has a lot of cool tech in it, and some engaging personality, and it’s affordable, and people are buying lots of them.”

Source: spectrum.ieee.org