Updated at 2:05 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 4: BostInno independently confirmed the news with Jim Lawton, the company’s COO.
Rethink Robotics, a Boston-based maker of collaborative robots for the industrial manufacturing industry, is shutting down.
Jim Lawton, the company’s COO, confirmed in an email to BostInno that the company closed its doors on Wednesday.
"We were early to market with a very innovative product that was ahead of its time, and unfortunately, we did not achieve the commercial success we had expected," Lawton wrote. "A planned acquisition of the company fell through at the last moment."
Lawton added that all of Rethink Robotics’ employees are being actively recruited for roles in other robotics firms.
Rethink Robotics was started by Ann Whittaker and iRobot co-founder Rodney Brooks in 2008, with former Dell executive Scott Eckert joining as CEO two years later.
The startup introduced the concept of "collaborative robots" (also known as "cobots"), human-friendly machines designed to automate "dull, dangerous and dirty jobs" in the manufacturing industry while working side-by-side on the factory floor with human co-workers. Named Baxter and Sawyer, the company's cobots were introduced in 2012 and 2015, respectively.
The company raised a total of almost $150 million in funding, according to Crunchbase, and its backers included Jeff Bezos’ Bezos Expeditions, CRV, Highland Capital Partners, Sigma Partners, DFJ, GE Ventures and Goldman Sachs.
In January last year, the company raised $18 million led by private equity firm Adveq (now renamed Schroder Adveq after being acquired in April 2017). Previous investors, including Bezos Expeditions, CRV, Highland Capital Partners, Goldman Sachs and GE Ventures, also participated in the latest round.
"Since its founding in 2008, Rethink Robotics was a pioneer in the industry and has been recognized for creating the entirely new category of collaborative robots," Lawton concluded. "We changed the way the world thinks about automation by designing robots that can safely be used near people, can sense their surroundings, and are able to perform tasks for which traditional robots were never a good fit. We remain excited about the future of collaborative robots and are pleased to see other providers incorporating our ideas into their automation solutions."
The Boston Globe also reported on Wednesday night that Rethink Robotics had been exploring an acquisition, but the deal fell through at the last minute. In a statement to The Robot Report, Eckert said that the company "didn’t quite achieve" the market success it had intended.
