Jibo: a $73M social robot shipped 3 years late into a smart-speaker world

Jibo was founded in 2012 by Cynthia Breazeal, an MIT Media Lab professor, to build an emotionally expressive 'social robot for the home'. In July 2014 the company launched an Indiegogo campaign that closed at $2.29 million from 5,554 backers — a record for a robot, on a $100,000 goal — with delivery promised for December 2015 at around $500. The campaign page's total later passed $3.7 million as pre-orders kept coming in.

The product shipped three years late, into a market that had moved. Delivery slipped to October 2016 and then to 2017, while Amazon Echo and Google Home put voice assistants in homes at $130 and under. Jibo raised a $25.3M Series A in January 2015 and an $11M extension, about $73 million in venture capital in all, and finally started shipping in September 2017 — public orders opened in October at $899, and Time named it one of the 25 best inventions of 2017. The robot's skills and voice recognition fell far short of the demo that had raised the money.

The collapse came fast. In June 2018 Jibo laid off most of its staff; the Boston office was emptied and the California office closed. On 20 June 2018 the company signed a security-interest transaction with SQN Venture Partners, an investment firm; the asset sale was reported in November and December 2018, with the price undisclosed. In March 2019 the robot told owners the servers 'will be turned off soon', danced a goodbye, and went dark — an $899 device dead after about 16 months on sale. NTT Disruption later bought Jibo's patents and inventory from SQN and relaunched the brand.