In August 2022, Amazon agreed to buy iRobot, maker of the Roomba, for $1.7 billion. For Amazon, the appeal was simple: a household robot that maps your floor plan and grows into a platform for the smart home. For the European Commission, the deal raised a fear that Amazon would use its marketplace power to push out iRobot’s rivals. In January 2024, Amazon abandoned the deal.
Colin Angle gets the call
August 2022
Amazon executive: Colin, we want to bring iRobot into Amazon. The Roomba is the closest thing people already have to a home robot, and it's the natural center of the smart home. Amazon can scale it the way we scaled Alexa.
Colin Angle: I've spent thirty years building this company through brutal competition. What does Amazon bring that we don't already have?
Amazon executive: Distribution, capital, the Alexa ecosystem, and a platform where your robots become more than vacuums. We'll pay you a full premium. Your shareholders will thank you, and so will the people who live with Roomba.
Colin Angle: Premium or not, I need to know the deal will clear. Amazon is the single most scrutinized company on the planet. Every regulator will treat this as Amazon trying to swallow another market.
Amazon executive: We'll manage it. iRobot is a small, shrinking business. Nobody blocks a $1.7 billion deal in the robot vacuum sector.
[Reconstruction from Amazon's and iRobot's public announcements and executives' statements on the rationale for the acquisition.]
The Commission digs in
2023
EU case officer: Amazon, we have opened an in-depth investigation. Our provisional concern is that the acquisition would allow Amazon to favor iRobot at the expense of rival robot vacuum manufacturers that depend on Amazon's marketplace, and to use iRobot's data to disadvantage them.
Amazon counsel: Robot vacuums are a tiny, fiercely competitive market. iRobot has lost share for years. Amazon has no ability or incentive to foreclose rivals, and the data concerns are speculative and addressable with remedies.
EU case officer: Amazon is the gatekeeper of online retail in Europe. Your incentives when you own a participant in one of the categories you host are fundamentally changed. That is exactly the kind of self-preferencing that the Digital Markets Act and merger control exist to prevent.
[The European Commission issued a statement of objections in November 2023 expressing serious doubts about the transaction's impact on competition in the robot vacuum market.]
Amazon walks away
January 2024
Amazon counsel: Andy, the Commission has made clear that clearing this deal will require remedies we don't think are acceptable—or, more likely, no clearing at all. We can litigate, but that means a multi-year fight over a $1.7 billion deal.
Andy Jassy: This is not a deal worth fighting regulators for. If they are determined to make an example of us in robot vacuums, there is no good path to close. We terminate, pay the fee, and move on.
Amazon counsel: Understood. iRobot will receive a $94 million termination fee and the company will cease to exist as an independent concern before the year is out.
[Amazon terminated the deal in January 2024, and iRobot subsequently collapsed as an independent company, later being acquired and restructured at a fraction of the abandoned price.]
The iRobot case became a symbol of how far the regulatory pendulum had swung. Amazon, which had once swallowed competitors without a second thought, had learned that even a small deal in a niche category could not proceed against the presumption of Europe’s enforcers.
[This document reconstructs the public record of the Amazon–iRobot transaction, including the European Commission's review and Amazon's statements. Dialogue is narrative reconstruction, not a verbatim transcript.]