“Goodbye, my sweet little robot prince.”

That’s “game over” for iRobot, the company that somehow turned “robot that vacuums your floor” into a multi-decade business… and then immediately fumbled the bag once competition showed up with the same product for half the price.

Yesterday, iRobot officially filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Except, this time, the company isn’t being saved by some heroic white-knight buyer. 

It’s going private after being refurbished by Picea Robotics… aka its own primary manufacturer. I think we can all agree, when the factory ends up owning the brand, you know things went sideways fast.

If you just so happen to own shares, don’t even look at the chart… shares are currently down (checks notes) 69%.

So how did we get here?

Well, iRobot pulled in about $682 million in revenue in 2024, but their profits got absolutely bodied by cheaper competitors… mostly Chinese brands like Ecovacs that figured out how to sell “robot goes vrrrr” for pennies on the dollar.

iRobot still dominates the U.S. and Japan (roughly 42% and 65% market share, respectively), but dominance doesn’t pay the bills if you’re cutting prices, upgrading tech, and fighting a global price war at the same time.

(Source: Quartz)

Then came tariffs. Where Donnie put a 46% levy on imports from Vietnam… where iRobot makes vacuums for the U.S.. That added about $23 million in costs this year alone.

Planning for the future became basically impossible. Which is usually a bad sign for companies trying to, you know, exist.

Then Jeff Bezos put the final nail in their robot coffin.

There was a moment (during peak lockdown insanity) when Amazon dangled $1.4 billion for iRobot and everyone assumed your Roomba was about to start reporting directly to Jeff Bezos.

Well, regulators disagreed.

European antitrust investigations dragged on, the deal died, and iRobot was left holding a 2023 loan it took out assuming Amazon money was coming. Spoiler: it didn’t.

(Source: Reason)

That loan ballooned into about $190 million in debt. When iRobot fell behind on payments, Picea (the China-based manufacturer) quietly bought the debt from funds managed by Carlyle.

Translation: the factory became the bank.

Under the restructuring plan, Picea takes 100% of the equity and wipes out the remaining $190 million loan, plus another $74 million owed under manufacturing agreements.

And even though customers are promised no disruption to apps, support, or products. That equity is gone. Vaporized. Reduced to a footnote.

For context: iRobot was valued at $3.56 billion in 2021 during peak “everyone is stuck at home and hates vacuuming” vibes. Today, before bankruptcy, it was worth around $140 million. Now it’s worth whatever Picea says it’s worth. Which is usually not a lot.

The final irony? The Roomba still cleans my house just fine. It just couldn’t clean up its balance sheet.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Amazon as mentioned in the article.