Amazon is shopping for the makers of the Roomba, the robotic vacuum cleaner.
iRobot might be purchased by Amazon for $1.7 billion, it mentioned.
Amazon didn’t say precisely what it intends to do with iRobot, or its fleet of robotic vacuum cleaners.
But the corporate has proven a eager curiosity in robotic gadgets for the house. Last 12 months, Amazon launched “Astro”, which places Alexa on wheels and permits it to drive round folks’s homes.
Amazon additionally already owns Ring, after shopping for the house safety firm in 2018. Ring is within the means of releasing what it calls the “Always Home Cam” – which flies round folks’s homes in order that they will test on them from afar.
Through the brand new buy, Amazon will achieve entry not solely to iRobot’s {hardware} but additionally the detailed maps that its cleaners are capable of take of individuals’s houses.
Amazon urged that the acquisition will enable for brand spanking new new methods to “make customers’ lives easier and more enjoyable”, in a press release attributed to Dave Limp, the top of Amazon Devices.
“Over many years, the iRobot team has proven its ability to reinvent how people clean with products that are incredibly practical and inventive—from cleaning when and where customers want while avoiding common obstacles in the home, to automatically emptying the collection bin,” he mentioned.
