Roomba: Hitting the Wall | The New Space Race

In December 2025, iRobot, the American company behind the Roomba, declared bankruptcy and was acquired by its Chinese supplier, Pisilla Robotics. For Wall Street Journal tech reporter Christopher Mims, the event was a bummer but not a surprise. The Roomba was the first and still the only truly successful mass-market robot in history, but iRobot had been in decline for years. Its fall feels like more than a single corporate failure — it looks like another case of Chinese tech absorbing an American innovator.

What the Roomba’s bankruptcy reveals about manufacturing and IP

The loss of iRobot is not just about one product line. Mims argues that when a company outsources manufacturing to China, it gives up more than production — it surrenders a feedback loop between designers and factory-floor workers that drives incremental innovation. Without that loop, institutional knowledge evaporates. Worse, the Chinese manufacturer gains direct access to the intellectual property and can produce cheaper copies. This is not new: industrial espionage and copying have existed since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, when Americans memorized English mill designs and replicated them in New England. But the scale and speed are different now. China’s legal environment does not protect foreign IP the way Western laws do, and the government can requisition data from any company operating wit