Filed under Consumer · 2019
Anki
2010 - 2019, 9 years old
A consumer robotics company behind the Cozmo and Vector AI companion robots and the Anki Drive racing system, marketed as real robotics in toy form.
Three CMU Robotics Institute alumni built a company that sold over 1.5 million robots and made Cozmo the best-selling toy of 2017, but Anki burned close to two hundred million dollars and could not sustain hardware margins at consumer price points. A planned funding round collapsed at the last minute in April 2019, acquisition talks with Microsoft, Amazon, and Comcast fell through, and the entire staff of roughly two hundred was laid off on May 1, 2019. Digital Dream Labs later bought the IP and brought back limited Cozmo and Vector service.
- Founded
- 2010-01
- Shut down
- 2019-05-01
- Funding raised
- $200M
- Years alive
- 9
- Founders
- Boris Sofman, Mark Palatucci, Hanns Tappeiner