Anki

Business model

Consumer robotics toys (Cozmo, Vector) combining AI personality with physical hardware.

In brief

Built genuinely charming AI-powered robot toys backed by real machine learning research, earning critical acclaim and a real fanbase. Consumer robotics proved a brutally low-margin hardware category, and after failing to close a final funding round, it abruptly shut down and laid…

See the What Happened tab for the full account.