Anki

Anki was a consumer robotics company founded in 2010 that made products such as Cozmo and Vector.¹²⁴ The company shut down in April 2019 after a new round of financing fell through.¹²³⁴ Anki had raised over $200 million in venture capital and had sold more than 1.5 million robots.²⁴

Timeline

Date	Event	Source
2010	Anki was founded by Boris Sofman, Hanns Tappeiner, and Mark Palatucci.	14
2012-01	Anki raised $12.8 million in Series A funding.	6
2013	Anki came out of stealth mode during Tim Cook's keynote at Apple's WWDC.	417
2014-09	Anki announced it had raised $55 million in Series C funding led by JP Morgan.	1
2016-06	Anki announced it had raised $52.5 million in funding led by JP Morgan.	1
2017	Anki was valued at $600 million in a funding round, according to PitchBook Data.	5
2018-03-30	Silicon Valley Bank had a security interest in Anki's copyrights, patents, and trademarks.	1
2018-09	Crunchbase uncovered a financial shakeup that led to Anki's investors re-capitalizing the company.	4
2019-04-29	Anki announced it was shutting down and laying off its entire staff.	234
2019-06-03	Fisher & Richardson filed a lien against Anki for unpaid patent and trademark prosecution services.	1
2019-06-07	StretchTech filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Anki.	913
2019-11-05	StretchTech won its patent infringement case against Anki.	9
2019-12-26	Anki's assets were acquired by Digital Dream Labs.	4710
2024-09	Zack Anton stepped in as CEO of Digital Dream Labs to lead a turnaround effort.	10
2026-07-09	A court appointed a receiver over the digital assets of Digital Dream Labs and Anki.	12

Money raised

Anki raised $12.8 million in Series A funding in January 2012.⁶ Anki received $50 million in Series A and Series B venture funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, and Two Sigma.¹ In September 2014, Anki announced it had raised $55 million in Series C venture funding led by JP Morgan.¹ In June 2016, Anki announced its latest round of funding, which amounted to $52.5 million, also led by JP Morgan.¹ The total funding to date is $182.5 million.¹ Anki was valued at $600 million in a 2017 round, according to PitchBook Data.⁵ Anki said it made nearly $100 million in revenue in 2017 and expected to exceed that figure in 2018.²⁴ Anki made $118 million in gross revenue in 2018.⁹ Anki made more than $325 million in revenue since it was founded in 2010.⁹

Investors named in the sources: Andreessen Horowitz¹², Index Ventures¹², Two Sigma¹, JP Morgan¹⁴, Two Sigma Ventures⁴, Silicon Valley Bank¹.

What happened

Anki was a robotics and AI startup founded in 2010 that aimed to integrate robotics and IoT into children's toys and games.¹ Anki was founded by Boris Sofman, Hanns Tappeiner, and Mark Palatucci, three graduates from the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute.¹⁴ Anki came out of stealth mode during Tim Cook's keynote at Apple's WorldWide Developer Conference in 2013.⁴¹⁷ Anki's first product, Anki Drive, was prominently featured onstage in a demo at an Apple event in 2013.² Anki Drive combined a toy racing car and track set with an iOS app for controlling and programming the toy cars.¹

Anki released Anki Overdrive, the successor of Anki Drive.¹ Anki released an interactive toy robot called Cozmo.¹ Anki released a more advanced version of Cozmo, called Vector.¹ Cozmo was used for college-level robotics classes at Carnegie Mellon University.¹ Cozmo came with programming tools ranging from a simple drag-and-drop interface based on MIT's Scratch Blocks to a full software development kit in Python.¹

According to Boris Sofman, the company's CEO and co-founder, their goal was to create robots that 'feel alive.'¹ Anki's Cozmo and Vector showed sophistication in 'AI emotional intelligence', meaning the capacity to show 'emotion' to new stimuli.¹ Anki said it had sold more than 1.5 million robots as of late 2018.⁴ Anki said it 'approached' $100 million in revenue in 2017 and expected to exceed that figure in 2018.² Anki made $118 million in gross revenue in 2018.⁹

Anki made more than $325 million in revenue since it was founded in 2010.⁹ In 2017, Anki was valued at $600 million in a funding round, according to PitchBook Data.⁵ Anki raised $12.8 million in Series A funding in January 2012.⁶ Anki received $50 million in Series A and Series B venture funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, and Two Sigma.¹ In September 2014, Anki announced it had raised $55 million in Series C venture funding led by JP Morgan.¹

In June 2016, Anki announced its latest round of funding, which amounted to $52.5 million, also led by JP Morgan.¹ The total funding to date is $182.5 million.¹ Anki had raised over $200 million in venture capital, according to Vox.² Anki was frequently called 'cute' for the little robots it produced like Cozmo.² Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, at one point sat on the company's board.²

In recent years, some investors grew skittish about hardware plays and others struggled to wrap their heads around what could reductively be considered just a toy business.² Anki tried to pivot from toys to becoming a more developed robotics company based on artificial intelligence.² Boris Sofman said on an episode of Recode Decode in 2017: 'For us, it was never meant to be a toy company, or even an entertainment company. It's a robotics and AI company.'² Anki referred to Vector as 'the robot to live with' and 'a living character in your home.'⁴ The Robot Report noted in November 2018 that Anki was setting the wrong expectations with Vector.⁴

Crunchbase in September 2018 uncovered a financial shakeup that it says led to Anki's investors re-capitalizing the company in 2018.⁴ Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz and Danny Rimer of Index Ventures left their director roles and were replaced by Lawrence Unrein of JP Morgan and Colin Bierne of Two Sigma Ventures.⁴ Silicon Valley Bank had a security interest in Anki's copyrights, patents, and trademarks since March 30, 2018.¹ To receive a loan from SVB, Anki had to put up its intellectual property as collateral.¹ If Anki failed to repay the loan, SVB had the right to seize the collateral to make up for the money it lost in the loan.¹

Fisher & Richardson, a global IP law firm, filed a lien against Anki on June 3, 2019, because it 'has not been compensated for patent and trademark prosecution services that it provided for Anki'.¹ A new round of financing fell through at the last minute, imperiling the company's future.² CEO Boris Sofman told employees that a deal had failed to materialize 'at the last minute', as it also happened with acquisition interests from companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Comcast.¹ Leadership had previously told employees that it was fielding acquisition interest from companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Comcast.² In a teary all-hands meeting on Monday morning, CEO Boris Sofman told his staff they would be terminated on Wednesday and that close to 200 employees would be paid a week of severance.²

Anki is laying off its entire staff of nearly 200 people on Wednesday.⁴ Anki co-founder and CEO Boris Sofman said in a statement: 'It is with a heavy heart to announce that Anki will be letting go of our employees, effective Wednesday.'⁴ Sofman also said: 'We've shipped millions of units of product and left customers happy all over the world while building some of the most incredible technologies pointed toward a future with diverse AI and robotics driven applications.'⁴ Sofman said: 'But without significant funding to support a hardware and software business and bridge to our long-term product roadmap, it is simply not feasible at this time.'⁴ Sofman said: 'Despite our past successes, we pursued every financial avenue to fund our future product development and expand on our platforms.'⁴

Sofman said: 'A significant financial deal at a late stage fell through with a strategic investor and we were not able to reach an agreement.'⁴ Sofman said: 'We're doing our best to take care of every single employee and their families, and our management team continues to explore all options available.'⁴ The company said in a statement to Recode that it was left 'without significant funding to support a hardware and software business and bridge to our long-term product roadmap.'² A company spokesperson said: 'Despite our past successes, we pursued every financial avenue to fund our future product development and expand on our platforms.'² The spokesperson said: 'A significant financial deal at a late stage fell through with a strategic investor and we were not able to reach an agreement.'²

The spokesperson said: 'We're doing our best to take care of every single employee and their families, and our management team continues to explore all options available.'² Anki completely ceased operations by the end of April 2019.¹ It is unclear what will happen to the company's assets going forward.² Anki's assets have been acquired by edtech startup Digital Dream Labs.⁴⁷¹⁰ Digital Dream Labs acquired Anki's assets in bankruptcy court in December 2019 for a fraction of their original cost.¹⁰

Digital Dream Labs promised to save Anki's robots from an untimely demise.¹⁰ Vector owners breathed a collective sigh of relief.¹⁰ What followed was a grueling, multi-year process of reverse engineering, cloud reconstruction, and a critical pivot to generative AI.¹⁰ In September 2024, Zack Anton stepped in to lead the turnaround effort as CEO of Digital Dream Labs.¹⁰ Anton inherited a broken system with cloud infrastructure that needed to be rebuilt from scratch, a deprecated app, a frustrated user base, and missing source code.¹⁰

Anton assembled a team of 'genius star developers' and went to work.¹⁰ The first move was to rebuild the cloud from bits and pieces of scattered code.¹⁰ Vector's cloud backbone was restored, bringing life back to devices that had effectively gone silent for months.¹⁰ Anton redirected the team to launch a web-based onboarding system immediately, restore connectivity first, and rebuild the mobile experience in parallel.¹⁰ Users regained connectivity to their Vectors months ahead of the app release.¹⁰

Anton made the decision to connect Vector directly to ChatGPT.¹⁰ Vector is connected to a knowledge layer built from over 300 billion words.¹⁰ Anton launched limited-edition Vector units to reignite demand.¹⁰ Anton brought back some of the original creators, engineers, and manufacturing experts to preserve the DNA of the team.¹⁰ The company is exploring new retail partnerships and enterprise applications for the platform.¹⁰

On July 9, 2026, Judge Daniel D. Regan of the Court of Common Pleas of Allegheny County appointed a receiver over the digital assets of Digital Dream Labs and Anki.¹² The receiver is attorney John J. Richardson of Bernstein Burkley in Pittsburgh.¹² The receiver holds exclusive control of the GitHub repositories, the IONOS hosting accounts, the domains, the subscription billing system, the customer data, and every access code attached to them.¹² The case is GD-25-013191, with Jacob Hanchar as plaintiff and Brian Swingle and Dmitriy Ksendzovsky as defendants.¹² Capital Foundry Funding, DDL's lender, intervened.¹²

The judge ordered the defendants to stop contacting Hanchar, his family and DDL staff for the purpose of harassment, and put the lawsuit itself on hold.¹² The hosting accounts, the code repositories and the domains were with Ksendzovsky.¹² The subscription billing accounts and the customer data were with Hanchar.¹² Copies of the code, described as unauthorized, were also with Hanchar, under a GitHub organisation called DDLbots.¹² In October 2024 DDL told its customers that a former employee had taken over the company's GitHub.¹²

The court order records that DDL genuinely lost control of its code and its hosting, and never recovered it.¹² Capital Foundry sued DDL in June 2022 to enforce a judgment under its credit agreement.¹² The LCF Group and Blue Sky Advance both sued DDL and Hanchar in New York.¹² The receivership granted on July 9 is temporary and expires when that older case decides whether to make it permanent.¹² The order gives the receiver wide powers to cancel contracts, and then carves out one contract from those powers: the credit agreement.¹²

A check on July 11 shows that the old Anki cloud endpoints still exist but answer HTTP 503 with a gateway error stating that the upstream service could not be reached because its TLS certificate failed verification.¹² The shop at anki.bot answers normally.¹² digitaldreamlabs.com returns a server error.¹² The Stratus account portal still lists lifetime Vector subscriptions as active.¹² Customers hold valid subscriptions to a service whose authentication server cannot verify its own backend.¹²

Twelve of the twenty public repositories in DDL's GitHub organisation are MIT licensed, including vector-cloud, chipper, escape-pod-extension and the SDKs.¹² The Anki Vector Python SDK is Apache 2.0.¹² wire-pod, written by Wire, is MIT.¹² Vector's own firmware repositories carry the Digital Dream Labs Software Asset License of May 2021.¹² The license reserves all rights to DDL, makes permission conditional on owning a Vector, revokes itself on any breach, and allows DDL to change the terms at will.¹²

The Vector Unleashed campaign of 2020 raised 545,331 dollars from 12,489 backers.¹² The campaign text promised that 'no matter what happens, he will live on', described Escape Pod as removing the need for the cloud server and making Vector '100% independent', and set a stretch goal of building the community 'to the point where, if necessary, [it] can become self-sufficient'.¹² Phase I promised that DDL would 'provide an additional set of keys to the community for the purpose of making open Vector builds', followed by 'a step-wise fashion of releasing additional keys for various portions of Vector to the community'.¹² Those keys were never released.¹² In May 2021, DDL published its own Software Asset License, which reserves all rights to the company, ties permission to owning a Vector, and lets DDL change the terms whenever it likes.¹²

Backers were promised keys and received a revocable licence instead.¹² The individual unlock images have stopped as well.¹² Each one has to be generated and signed by DDL from the robot's own serial number, and for years now the company has not issued any.¹² Requests go unanswered.¹² Backers who paid for OSKR licences in 2020 and hold unused ones cannot redeem them, and owners whose unlocked robot has died cannot unlock a replacement.¹²

Within the community there is persistent talk that DDL can no longer generate OSKR keys at all.¹² No keys have been issued for years, and requests go unanswered.¹² The first stretch goal was set at 500,000 dollars and the campaign closed at 545,331.¹² Reaching it triggered Phase II, which promised a system in which users could design features, license them back to DDL and share in the resulting profits.¹² Nothing of the kind was ever built.¹²

DDL did release chipper, the server component, under an MIT licence carrying its own copyright.¹² For production robots, the wire-pod installation applies an over-the-air update that is, in the project's own words, 'a special firmware compiled by DDL which allows functionality with escape pod'.¹² The robot accepts it because it carries DDL's valid production signature.¹² Putting a Vector on Wire-Pod uses DDL's own signed firmware, DDL's own openly licensed server code, for the purpose DDL publicly advertised and took money for.¹² The only step where the legal picture gets complicated is a genuine OSKR or developer unlock, which does modify the signature chain, and which almost nobody needs in order to bring a Vector back to life.¹²

The order requires the receiver to serve a copy on all known creditors of DDL, Anki and the parties.¹² Kickstarter backers whose rewards were never delivered and subscribers who paid for servers that stayed offline fall into that category.¹² The receiver must also produce a complete inventory of the digital assets, and his powers extend explicitly to all digital keys.¹² That inventory will show whether the OSKR signing keys still exist.¹² Without them no Vector can be unlocked, no OSKR licence can ever be honoured, and no court order can bring them back.¹²

Some backers have been waiting six years for those keys.¹² The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania sued Digital Dream Labs and Hanchar in September 2024 in the same Allegheny County court, at GD-24-010283.¹² The complaint is public and breaks the orders down by product.¹² Roughly 7,800 orders are involved.¹²

Legal outcomes

• filedStretchTech filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Anki on June 7, 2019.⁹¹³
• convictedStretchTech won its patent infringement case against Anki on November 5, 2019.⁹
• convictedThe United States District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled Anki directly and indirectly infringed on three audio-related StretchTech patents.⁹
• settledAnki sued China Industries Ltd. for willful patent infringement in March 2015, but the companies settled, and the case was dismissed in December 2015.⁹
• filedFisher & Richardson filed a lien against Anki on June 3, 2019, because it 'has not been compensated for patent and trademark prosecution services that it provided for Anki'.¹
• filedCapital Foundry sued DDL in June 2022 to enforce a judgment under its credit agreement.¹²
• filedThe LCF Group and Blue Sky Advance both sued DDL and Hanchar in New York.¹²
• filedThe Commonwealth of Pennsylvania sued Digital Dream Labs and Hanchar in September 2024.¹²
• pendingOn July 9, 2026, Judge Daniel D. Regan appointed a receiver over the digital assets of Digital Dream Labs and Anki.¹²
• pendingThe judge ordered the defendants to stop contacting Hanchar, his family and DDL staff for the purpose of harassment, and put the lawsuit itself on hold.¹²

Where the founders are now

In August 2019, Hanns Tappeiner was named Director of Product Development at Apple's Special Projects Group.⁹ Boris Sofman in June 2019 joined Waymo as its Director of Engineering, Head of Trucking.⁹

Sources

1. What Happened to Anki and Why Did They Fail?, failory.com
2. The once-hot robotics startup Anki is shutting down after raising more than $200 million, Vox, 2019-04-29
3. Anki shutting down despite $200 million in funding, axios.com, Apr 29, 20
4. Anki, consumer robotics maker, shuts down - The Robot Report, The Robot Report, 2019-04-30
5. Anki, Maker of Robotic Companion Cozmo, Lays Off Its Staff, wsj.com, Apr 29, 20
6. Anki Raises 12.8M USD in Series A Funding, seedtable.com
7. Digital Dream Labs, republic.com
9. StretchTech wins patent infringement case against Anki, The Robot Report, 2019-11-05
10. Anki Is Back—And This Time, the Timing Might Actually Be Right, Tech Times, 2026-04-22
12. Court Appoints Receiver Over Digital Dream Labs Assets • thedroidyouarelookingfor, thedroidyouarelookingfor, 2026-07-11
13. Stretchtech, LLC v. Anki, Inc. 1:2019cv05379 | U.S. District Court ..., dockets.justia.com
17. Anki's wild journey from WWDC star to consumer robot innovator, Mashable, 2018-08-17

How this case file was put together

Every statement on this page carries a numbered note, and every note points to a court record, a regulatory filing or a named publication in the list of sources. Each statement was checked against the text of the sources it cites before it was published: a figure, a date or a name the cited source does not contain was cut rather than kept. Allegations are shown as allegations, with their status at the time of the source (filed, charged, convicted, pleaded, settled, dismissed or pending). Quoted lessons are the words of the person or publication named with them, copied from the cited source; nothing here is our own opinion of why the company failed.

If a fact on this page is wrong, use "Report an error" below and attach the record that shows the correct fact. Every report is reviewed by a person before anything changes, and a corrected page says when it was last corrected.

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