Anki Shutting Down
vox.com
vox.com
In 2017, I was reselling Anki Cozmos to help fund a side project I was working on.
The buyers were consistently some of the most enthusiastic parents I had ever met. I had never heard a single piece of negativity towards Cozmo.
My favorite memory was taking the train for 2 hours each way to visit someone's home and help them troubleshoot their Cozmo's problems.
People here are claiming that Cozmo was too expensive, but I'd argue that Cozmo wasn't expensive enough.
Interested parents will pay a lot for high quality and well designed educational toys for their children. I know this because I was reselling Cozmos for 50%+ more than their price tag.
I had no idea of Anki's true ambitions in robotics and AI. I think it's that lack of focus that killed them.
There is absolutely a market for well designed educational toys, but it's not a business that needs 9 figures in funding.
I hope someone else will come in and take the lead, because this is a great niche, but one that doesn't necessarily need VC funding, just organic growth due to steady, incremental, product improvements.
Well, there's your problem right there. I have a feeling this was a company that would have done well if it had avoided the lure of VC funding, built its product and scaled slowly solving the interesting and challenging problems of building a home/play robot and getting consumers to like and want it, eventually selling to an Amazon or Google for a $100M+ exit.
Instead, they tried to fund their way to become a robot unicorn and died an undercorn.
Same sentiment with respect to getting acquired. Having 4 or 5 giant companies control everything is terrible for the long term health of the industry.
I later found out that a company I worked for had come within 2 months of running out of cash before their next round of funding came through. I'm glad they didn't shut down at that point to pay a "proper" severance.
The servers are still up; presumably so they can keep selling their existing stock for the conceivable future. But the full promise of functionality for Vector will never arrive.
Also, from my experience, Anki was really good with the security behind Vector. He's so locked down that they'd have to officially release a firmware just to provide the functionality to load alternative firmwares or access other services. And with SSL you can't MTTM any of his connections.
I just don't see them having the resources to do anything more useful at this point.
https://github.com/anki/drive-sdk https://github.com/jacopotagliabue/anki-drive-python-sdk
On another note, not sure why some people are complaining about the price. I own a Cozmo and Vector, both seemed fairly priced to me.
Both the children and adults who have interacted with Cozmo (in my case) have been genuinely captivated by the "Wall-E" like personality, and how fun their little desk companion toy can be.
This is actually really sad news. With everyone being laid off, it doesn't look like there's going to be some sort of angel acquisition by Apple or something either.
:(
My gut tells me that AI toys weren't the end game, since it's such a low margin space, but just a way to get there and they ran out of runway before they could reach that point.