After raising 1.3 billion yuan, Anki, a star startup competing with Google, suddenly died! Its first product was praised by Apple, and it closed down

Yuyang Qianming from Aofei Temple
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Two months ago, Anki , which had just been named No. 1 in the robotics field by Fast Company as the "World's Most Innovative Company in 2019" , suddenly died.

Anki is a star startup that was once highly sought after in Silicon Valley and has received financing of US$200 million (approximately RMB 1.347 billion). Investors include well-known Silicon Valley venture capital institutions A16Z, Index Ventures, JPMorgan Chase, etc. A16Z founder Marc Andreessen was once a member of the company's board of directors.

Their first product was featured at Apple's WWDC and received high praise from Cook. Later, the media rated them as a company that could compete with "Google". Both Microsoft and Amazon had thought about acquiring them...

Its small robot Cozmo, launched in 2016, has set off a craze and become an officially certified teaching robot by Carnegie Mellon University.

Just after it sold more than 6.5 million products and had annual revenue of nearly $100 million - it stopped in April this year.

Become another fallen robotics company.

Death of Anki

According to technology media Recode, on the morning of April 29th local time in the United States, Anki held an employee meeting, where its Boris Sofman told more than 200 employees that they would be fired on Wednesday and each would receive one week's severance pay.

A few days ago, these employees were also told that Anki intended to seek additional funds after a new round of financing failed.

In the end, the financing was not successful, and acquisitions by giants such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Comcast were not finalized.

Anki said in a statement:

Despite past success, various financial channels are still needed to fund product development as well as platform expansion.

Without a large amount of funds to support hardware and software businesses, development will be difficult to sustain.

They said the company is doing its best to take care of every employee and their family, and the management team will further explore all possibilities.

The closure came somewhat unexpectedly.

On March 3 this year, its CEO Boris Sofman posted on social media to celebrate Anki's good performance in the Fast Company selection.

In just over a month, earth-shaking changes have taken place.

The closure of Anki has also sparked a lot of discussion on social media.

Some people have commented that it's really hard to start a consumer hardware company, even if it has really cool hardware.

Recode even gave the evaluation of "It's a hard, hard fall".

What kind of company is this?

Anki was founded by three doctoral students who graduated from the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University and was once a hot startup in the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence.

The company was founded in 2010. Its first product, Anki DRIVE (smart car toy) , launched in 2013 , was featured on Apple WWDC. Cook commented that it "created a comprehensive new toy experience."

The following year, the product became the second best-selling toy on Amazon.

In 2016, Anki launched the small robot Cozmo, which led to a wave of popularity. Not only did it become an official teaching robot certified by Carnegie Mellon University, but this "drama queen" robot that can act cute and has a bit of a temper also received a lot of attention on social media, and the evaluation video went viral.

In this year, the second generation product of Anki DRIVE, Anki OVERDRIVE, was released, and Cozmo became a hot seller, pushing Anki's name onto the list of the four best-selling high-end toys during the 2016 holiday season.

In 2017, Cozmo became the best-selling toy on Amazon's toy sales rankings, and the company revealed that its revenue for the year was close to $100 million.

Anki did not stop there. In 2018, they launched the home robot Vector.

Although it looks very similar to Cozmo, Vector is actually closer to the voice wizard products on the market. That is to say, it can be cute in person and help you take pictures, time, and set alarms.

But it is worth noting that this time Anki chose to launch a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter. The official explanation is that they hope to put Vector into a larger design platform and technology community.

To date, Anki has sold 6.5 million robots, with 1.5 million sold in August 2018 alone.

Although the sales were good, it was unable to stop the downward trend and eventually ended up going bankrupt.

Many users expressed "sadness" and "regret", etc. After all, the Cozmo experience they developed is very good.

Robotics companies closing down

It's not just Anki. Many robot companies have gone bankrupt in recent years.

In August 2018, Bosch's Kuri robot announced that it would stop production. In October, Rethink Robotics, a robotics company founded by the godfather of MIT robotics, announced its closure. In December, Jibo, the originator of social robots, closed down.

Since the beginning of 2019, Seven Dreamers, a company that developed an automatic clothes-folding robot, has also declared bankruptcy.

The statements of these companies’ bankruptcy also revealed the reasons for their bankruptcy. There are three main reasons:

First, there is not enough money to support the company's development; second, the market still does not meet expectations; and finally, it is difficult to make technological breakthroughs.

Now, Anki has been added to the list.