Robotics startup Anki is shutting down

https://www.recode.net/2019/4/29/18522966/anki-robot-cozmo-staff-layoffs-robotics-toys-boris-sofman

by yitchelle • 7 years ago

64 21 7 years ago

dawhizkid• 7 years ago

Only a week of severance? That is completely ridiculous. The founders & investors (including a16z) should be ashamed.

0x8BADF00D• 7 years ago

It could have been worse. One of my coworkers worked at a BigCo back in the day, and those layoffs didn’t give you anything.

lsaferite6• 7 years ago

Don't forget the 2 days notice.

minimaxir• 7 years ago

This one is legit surprising. Anki had big physical booths at retailers, although admittingly I've always seen those booths completely full. (they're expensive)

xiaolingxiao• 7 years ago

a friend of mine work(ed) there, we're both PennRobotics. They were very ambitious with all the things they were trying to build. It seems like they just ran out of money and couldn't sell enough (no offense) robotics toys. It's a reminder that despite the hype and fear-mongering, real life application of robotics in consumer space is very limited, with questionable demand.

yitchelle• 7 years ago

As a device for freeing up my time to do other things, I would really welcome robotics into my household. I have a robovac and that give me a glimpse of what is possible. Unfortunately, its intelligence is not quite there yet and its maintenance is quite high, but we are getting there.

telotortium• 7 years ago

Yay! Less name squatting on the name of the Anki flashcard app.

rmwaite• 7 years ago

How is that name squatting?

throwaway66666• 7 years ago

Horrible... I thought they were doing fantastic. Everyone loved Cozmo. Superb reviews, insanely good marketing. Claimed they sold 1 million robots. 100m in revenue. What went wrong?

lsaferite6• 7 years ago

Their burn rate on cash was too high. They had a ton of overhead costs in the R&D stages.

I loved Anki, but I'm guess it's good I never exercised my options.

I feel for all the employees.

kissgyorgy• 7 years ago

What the fuck happened? I bought Vector, now it will be useless???

lsaferite6• 7 years ago

It'll be interesting to see what happens.

Vector relies heavily on cloud services to operate. That being said, it's a full fledged stand-alone device from a base computing POV. It could be operated without cloud services. You just lose things like voice-to-text processing and any advanced functionality they moved off the device into a service.

throwaway808080• 7 years ago

Robotics is hard because hardware is hard. Add software complexity to it and it grows to a monster. Rather than shutting down, i’d have hoped them to be acquired by someone else with deeper funds.

lsaferite6• 7 years ago

That's what they were attempting to do. They failed and the result is shutting down with 2 days notice.

xt002• 7 years ago

Robotic toys is a tough area. Higher than standard toy development costs, relatively limited market / higher cost products and similar challenges to being in a toy market. I mean — they probably could have pivoted to self driving car software or something.. too bad.

sytelus• 7 years ago

I don't think so. I know folks in education where there is huge money and demand for such toys. You still have to prepare great program, tools and have right connection but if you can do it then you get a sell of thousands of robots in one sweep. Virtually every public school (in well off areas) is dying to introduce robotics. Almost every district has some sort of robotics competition going on. When I drive to work, I see about half dozen street signs for robotics/stem summer camps. I might be biased living in tech heavy crowd but I hear its same in districts which have decent amount of money. Besides education, robotics toys is high in demand for kids. Consistently many top 10 Christmas toys have been toys that were claimed to be robots but unfortunately they are just scams with few pre-programmed things. Cosmo is one of the best robot built for kids besides Lego Boost and Mindstorm for older kids. It was definitely bit expensive and lacking good marketing outside of tech crowd but it was a real robotic toy and deserved better outcome.

lsaferite6• 7 years ago

They never considered themselves a toy maker. The first 3 products were considered toys and a means to an end. Their 4th product was them trying to transition to their long-term goal of being a Robotics and AI tech company. The 5th product that was in R&D was certainly not a toy.

xt002• 7 years ago

Interesting — what was their next product? I haven’t been following them recently.

RavlaAvlar• 7 years ago

After Jibo and Anki, can we concluded that social is a dumb idea?

MrGilbert• 7 years ago

That's sad - I wonder how "hackable" vector and cozmo are, now that the parent company will be gone.

Robotics startup Anki is shutting down

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