iRobot’s Chapter 11 filing on December 14, 2025 is a gut punch for one of America’s best-known robotics pioneers—and a reminder that “bankruptcy” doesn’t always mean the lights go out.
The Roomba maker, which says it has sold more than 50 million robots since launching Roomba in 2002, entered bankruptcy court with a plan to keep operating while it restructures. Under a court-supervised process, Picea Robotics is set to acquire the company, effectively handing iRobot a chance to reboot under new ownership rather than simply vanish.
Still, for founder and longtime CEO Colin Angle, the filing is the final chapter of a bruising stretch that began when Amazon walked away from its deal to buy iRobot—an outcome Angle calls “avoidable.”
Amazon and iRobot terminated the acquisition on Jan. 29, 2024 after an extended review period and escalating regulatory concerns, particularly in Europe. The deal, originally announced in 2022 at roughly $1.7 billion ($61 per share), ultimately didn’t survive the scrutiny.
In the conversation below, Angle argues that regulators misread the competitive landscape, describes the grinding reality of an 18-month review, and reflects on iRobot’s chaotic early days—from near-misses to surprise demand spikes. He also hints at what’s next: a new consumer robotics venture (previously reported as Familiar Machines & Magic) that he says will focus on health- and wellness-adjacent use cases and emotional interaction.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
“This should have been a no-brainer”
You called the bankruptcy “avoidable” and a “tragedy for consumers.” What do you think regulators got wrong in blocking the Amazon acquisition?
Angle frames the central issue as mission drift inside the regulatory process: agencies designed to protect competition, he argues, treated a shrinking player as if it were a future monopolist.
He says iRobot and Amazon came together “for the expressed purpose of creating more innovation, more consumer choice,” and he points to what he describes as a rapidly shifting competitive landscape. Angle claims iRobot’s market share in the EU was about 12% and declining, while new competitors were growing quickly—evidence, in his view, of a dynamic market.
Angle argues the review didn’t match the reality on the ground:
“This should have been a no-brainer. This should have been three, four weeks of investigation.”
Instead, he says, the process dragged on for roughly a year and a half, leaving the company operating under a cloud of uncertainty.
The 18-month grind
What was that process actually like?
Angle describes the review as consuming and expensive, both for iRobot and Amazon. He claims the document production was massive—potentially 100,000+ documents—and says the company diverted meaningful resources to compliance work while trying to keep the business running.
He also recounts a moment during a deposition that left him angry: he says he saw what looked like a wall of “trophies” celebrating blocked deals. For Angle, that symbolized a culture clash between regulators and the startup world.
“Here’s an agency whose stated mission is protecting consumer interests… celebrating as victories every time they shut down M&A… which… is the primary driver of value creation for the innovation economy.”
What the iRobot story looked like before Roomba
Angle’s iRobot origin story is very “academic lab meets stubborn optimism”: a group of researchers in the early 1990s who believed robotics was overdue.
He credits co-founder Rodney Brooks for pioneering ideas that helped put machine intelligence into lower-cost robots. The mission, as Angle puts it, was to build ambitious products, ship, and survive.
Along the way, he points to non-consumer milestones that shaped the company:
- Deepwater Horizon (2010): Angle notes iRobot technology contributed to response efforts; iRobot’s Seaglider autonomous underwater vehicles were used for subsurface monitoring in the Gulf.
- PackBot: He describes PackBot as a widely used tool in military and EOD contexts, including deployments in Afghanistan.
- NASA rover work: Angle says early iRobot work influenced rover efforts, and biographies note Angle’s name is inscribed inside the Spirit rover’s casing.
He also highlights iRobot’s role at Fukushima—while acknowledging that some of the specific details (like dollar totals and exact headcounts) are part of his personal recollection. The broadly documented point: iRobot robots were deployed to help gather information inside reactor buildings during the response.
Roomba’s launch, the demand spike, and “we knew nothing about marketing”
Angle says Roomba didn’t show up until roughly 12 years after iRobot was founded—and even then, it started as a scrappy internal effort with a tiny budget and a short deadline.
Roomba’s early success, he argues, wasn’t powered by traditional marketing. It was media curiosity, followed by a demand shock the company failed to plan for. iRobot built too many units the following year, then found itself sitting on inventory.
And then, in Angle’s telling, a twist: a Pepsi ad featuring Dave Chappelle and a Roomba led to a sudden sales surge that cleared the warehouse.
Whether you view that as luck or leverage, Angle’s takeaway is blunt: iRobot survived as much on timing and cultural weirdness as it did on engineering.
Lidar vs. vision: why iRobot bet the other way
Asked about rivals like Roborock and Ecovacs pushing lidar navigation earlier, Angle defends iRobot’s long bet on vision-based navigation and broader “situational understanding.” He argues lidar was an expedient solution for a slice of the problem, not the end state of home robotics.
He also concedes iRobot made strategic calls that didn’t match what customers ultimately wanted—such as being late to the two-in-one vacuum+mop form factor.
Advice to robotics founders
Angle’s guidance is less about sensors and more about reality checks:
- Know your market cold—robotics is expensive and unforgiving.
- Don’t fall in love with “a robot” as the product; focus on the problem it solves.
- Remember that novelty doesn’t equal value, and consumers won’t pay for romance alone.
What’s next
Angle says he’s building a new consumer-facing company in stealth, focused on robots that can sustain an “enduring co-character” relationship—emotionally sophisticated enough to be useful in health and wellness contexts, without pretending to be human.
He’s still chasing the same idea that launched iRobot decades ago:
“We were promised robots… and we don’t have the ones that I want yet.”