According to the Financial Times, Roomba has sold more than 40 million robotic devices, most of them robotic vacuum cleaners.[a]
Many of those vacuum cleaners have cameras, can move around on their own, and are connected to the Internet. If they're taken offline, they stop working. Many have microphones too.
The new Chinese owner will get control of a network of tens of millions Internet-connected, autonomously mobile, camera/microphone-equipped robots already inside people's homes and offices.
More than 40 million is a lot. For comparison, the US has ~132 million households.
---
[a] https://www.ft.com/content/239d4720-aee4-443d-a761-1bd8bb1a1...
I'm all for antitrust, but it's a shame the Amazon acquisition was blocked.[0]
iRobot was in a distressed state then, and immediately laid of 1/3 of staff when the deal fell through. I knew a survivor of that mess. Now this.
0: https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/29/24034201/amazon-irobot-ac...
This is the cost of complacency. They were ahead for so long then the likes of Roborock just left them in the dirt. I remember the first time I tried one of the Roborock devices, and until then I have been a long time Roomba user (like, 20 years). I just couldn’t believe how much better it was. And iRobot just stubbornly refused to iterate on their fundamental products.
Are there any good robo-vacuum cleaners that will still clean your floor if the internet is down?
I've had my Miele vacuum cleaner for 15 years now, and I bought it second hand. I can still buy bags and filters for it, and when the floor roller piece broke (something heavy fell on it) I was able to buy a replacement one for cheap. I see no reason why it can't go another 10 years.
It feels like a very low probability that a robo-cleaner I buy now will come from a company that (in 10+ years) will a) exist and b) support 10+ year old vacuum cleaners.
One of the privacy fears stoked about iRobot years ago was about them "selling maps of your home to the highest bidder" for advertising purposes. E.g., https://gizmodo.com/roombas-next-big-step-is-selling-maps-of...
The premise still strikes me as a ridiculous one: Am I possibly a more affluent customer because there is a high pile rug under the coffee table? How much would Charmin pay to know I have two rooms with tiled floors?
What iRobot actually suggested was more mundane: that there could hypothetically exist a protocol for smart devices to share a spatial understanding of the home, and that their existing robot was in a favorable position to provide the map. The CEO talking about it like a business opportunity rather than a feature invited the negative reception.
It didn't help that a few years later, photos collected by development units in paid testers' homes for ML training purposes were leaked by Scale AI annotators (akin to Mechanical Turk workers). This again became "Roomba is filming you in the bathroom" in the mind of the public.
The privacy risk seemed entirely hypothetical—there was no actual consumer harm, only vague speculation about what the harm could be, and to my knowledge the relevant features never even existed. And yet the fear of Alexa having a floorplan of your home could have been great enough to play a role in torpedoing the Amazon acquisition.
If you've used any non-iRobot vacuum alternatives in the last 5 years and ever owned a Roomba in the past there should be nothing surprising about this headline.
It's shocking to me how good Roborock mop-vacuums are for example, Eufy vacuums are nice as well. They still run into unavoidable issues, but they're: much quieter even at their highest setting; show you how they map out the space; allow you to easily customize routes or focus on specific rooms; do a shockingly good job at self-emptying; and best of all you don't have to rescue them from the exact same sliding door track every single time you run them.
How bad were they doing? I thought this is a good time to be in robotics and was actually thinking roomba could be the big beneficiary in the new AI personal robot craze. Very surprising to see they filed for bankruptcy, could they have not just raised private equity with some ai buzzwords?
Roomba should have taken Detroit's approach and asked the government to make any of the better vacuums cost 3x the price of a Roomba
About time. They never iterated and made a better product. All of the roombas end up being bump sensor machines, the mapping is garbage. My $200 Roborock has lidar and works flawlessly compared to my roomba I bought 3 years prior for $700. Sure there is a gap on years but the difference is light years apart.
What is alienating to me is how a “chinese” owner seems so much worse than any other nationality in this discussion.
How is this different from anybody else?
I was rather happy with my old, dumb Roomba. It just bounced around until things were clean. No cloud required. No mapping. No AI marketing foo. Seems like all the newer alternatives want internet access and send maps of your premises to some cloud somewhere. Seems completely unnecessary to me.
They outsourced production to China thinking that they can just do the marketing in US.
Now they learnt that Chinese can do marketing too.
People are mentioning alternatives, but do any of them have the repairability of a Roomba? The maker was famous for keeping parts readily available for even the oldest models, and making it so replacing parts was easy (although I've heard that in mid-2024 they started on some model making wheels, chassis, and motors an integrated unit that the user cannot easily service).
If you were happy with your Roomba you could keep it running for many many years. You only needed to buy a new Roomba if you wanted new features.
I wonder what happens to the app and cloud functionality.
> Under the restructuring, vacuum cleaner maker Shenzhen PICEA will receive the entire equity stake in the reorganized company. The company’s common stock will be wiped out under the proposed Chapter 11 plan.
Hopefully they keep the lights on.
Doesn't/didn't iRobot have a defense business as well? Or am I confused here. I don't see anything about it in the article.
Where is Lina Khan who struck down the acquisition? Read the comments from the FTC. That was from less than two years ago. I am all for antitrust but Lina Khan was inept as they come in terms actually dealing with anti competitiveness in the tech.
This is called dumping. Long-term dumping but it is what it is.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/01/...
It was bound to happen. I had bought two different robo vaccums at two different times (in 2022[irobot], then 2025[eufy], both upwards of $400) - they both were pretty terrible and I ended up returning both of them. I can't believe people are still using these things. They get stuck when there is no reason to get stuck, they miss dirt that should be picked up.
Why does a robotic vacuum cleaner need to connect to the internet at all? Mine doesn't (Neato Botvac D85) and it works fine.
I bought a roomba because I associated it with quality. It's crap! I bought a nice mopping model. The cheap one I had before was even better with a simple only-turn-left algorithm. I'm not surprised by this.
Reading the comments, I'm glad the industry is way ahead, and I was just confused. I think I'm gonna sell and get a better one.
This is one of the reasons why data collection is such a big problem: companies either sell the data, or they get bought themselves. If you trust a service with your data, all you need to do is wait.
Before clicking through I read the url as bloomber-glaw and thought it might be a phishing / fake news type of thing.
Not a particularly useful comment but curious of others also have trouble reading that domain.
I wonder if they would still be in business if they worked offline.
My brother has a house that is pretty much custom-made for a robo-vacuum. One level, no transitions, they have pets. And they like it well enough (not an iRobot)--and it still gets tangled up in stuff from time to time.
I have a 2-level house. Even after some house work, one room that probably still has too high a transition. A lot of different surfaces (And I'm not religious with cords and the like.) I'm guessing that my house is a lot more typical of a lot of houses of any size that would justify an iRobot type of device.
Decided a few years ago that a broom vac just made a lot more sense.
I had a Roomba about 10 years ago. It was OK but required a lot of “handholding” to not run over cords, kids toys, etc. It just was not really worth it to use it in an environment where you can’t keep everything nailed down and off the floor at all times. Relocated it to a basement level where we had much more empty but sill finished space. The cat angrily pooped just outside her litter box and the Roomba ran right over it and shredded them turds all over the floor. Since then it has lived in my mind as the dumbest smart product.
The real problem for me has been that I want something to straighten out my living spaces, not to vacuum the floors. Vacuuming is quick and a good vacuum cleaner (old school bagged kind, not a silly filter one), will do a far better job than a little battery powered gizmo anyways. But a robot capable of picking up the toys my kids like to leave out, or bringing abandoned coffee mugs to the sink (can you tell I live with multiple adults and children?) would be worth quite a bit to me. A robot capable of washing my dishes and putting away my laundry would be worth more. One capable of preparing meals would be worth more to me than a car.
Of course they would have to be 100% open source with easily replaceable and repairable components, which is where I think most of these types of projects go wrong. I remember seeing the Chefee demo and it was very cool but the main problem is that you aren’t buying a product, you are investing in the idea that the company behind it won’t go belly up in two years and brick your $60,000 chef/cabinet/fridge thing and that it won’t sell itself to e.g. Google which will cram it full of ads and spyware.
Does anyone have recommendations for a robot vacuum that can handle dog hair and won't sell my floorplan to advertisers?
This is a shame. Unsure about later models, but my Roomba 620 is eminently repairable. Just last weekend I replaced the wheels with some original (from iRobot).
It'll still be going in another 10 years, but the AliExpress sourced parts are never of the same quality.
Not too surprising. iRobot was all into SIFT for 15 years before the patent expired in 2020. Meanwhile, Chinese robot vacuums reverse engineered/stole/copy Neato's XV-11 lidar and made it better over the span of a decade (RIP Neato). iRobot joined the lidar party recently but it was too little too late. Product was too expensive and their brand was soured by the poor VSLAM performance. I had one of their mopping robots during the pandemic and you had to keep the lights on to mop. It would often get really lost if it went under a table. I got rid of it and replaced it with a roborock shortly after.
So the FTC blocked Amazon's acquisition of iRobot in January 2024 and now China gains control of the assests for a bargain? Another stupid application of antitrust.
Well, time to see if valetudo (or some other "free the vacuums" project) can help me replace the firmware on mine...
Didn't Amazon acquire iRobot?
They went bankrupt even with all the personal floor map data they sold?
iRobot’s largest creditor isn’t its Chinese supplier. It’s the US government, in the form of unpaid tariffs, some $3.5 million. Arguably it was Trump’s stupid tariffs that drove the company out of business. Rather than bringing manufacturing to the US, it allowed the Chinese to acquire an American company, leaving production right where it is.
One more proof that you need real industrial policy, not just 'let the market handle it'. Otherwise you end up as a consumer of products designed and manufactured somewhere else.
The good thing is that China has proven that there is a way to turn not-industrial country into industrial one. So there is a blueprint for that.
>A hoped-for by acquisition by Amazon.com in 2023 collapsed over regulatory concerns.
I never understood why the US objected to this. Amazon was not in that business.
But you see acquisitions like Paramount that will eventually turn US media into a near monopoly with probably 2 or 3 players. Now we have a fight over who will pick up WB, I am sure who ever wins the fight will have the merger approved. But Amazon, denied.
FWIW, I have no love for Amazon, but they were not trying to buy a company like Walmart which will be far worse then buying iRobot.
My Roomba is about 10 years old, works great and I can still get parts for it. I guess that's where they messed up.
Now all their customer data will be sold to the highest bidder.
Makes sense, 20 years of needing to have no rugs, cords, toys on the floor, masquerading as a cleaner
:(
I guess my romba is about to be banished to a private network now.
The problem is that all are quite tall which is a problem with some older sofas etc. Samsung did one "slim" model I think some time ago, but not sure if you can still buy it.
Non-paywalled article: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-15/robot-vac...
will be replaced by humanoid robots soon
iRobot's failure is that they made a bet to use CV instead of Lidar for their mapping robots for a long time until it was too late. That made their affordable, non-mapping robots far far worse than only slightly higher priced lidar robots, while their mapping robots were too expensive for mass appeal and were still worse at navigation than up-market lidar based robots. Ultimately they were simply outcompeted.
Another success for EU antitrust law. By blocking an acquisition, they have allowed a bankruptcy purchase by a Chinese firm so that the market is between a few Chinese firms.
robot vacuums never made economic sense over a maid service
In one of the articles, they said Roomba were greatly affected by tariffs. Well, this company has been in business for a long time and should have figured out how to build roomba in the US, that would have been great innovation.
But like most US corp, they only cared about profits and stock price.
https://archive.ph/7DyNA