iRobot opens its books: 1.2 million Roombas
iRobot went public at 24 dollars a share, and its registration statement disclosed that it had sold more than 1.2 million Roomba vacuuming robots over three years, and that they accounted for 73.8% of 2004 revenue.
Why it matters
For the first time the number of autonomous robots in ordinary homes was a figure in a document filed with a regulator rather than an estimate. A robot that finds its own way around a room was already selling in millions, seven years before the field began talking about robotics at scale.
The offering of 4,300,000 shares was priced at 24 dollars a share, trading on NASDAQ under the ticker IRBT, with Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan as joint book-running managers. The S-1/A states: "Over the past three years, we sold more than 1.2 million of our Roomba floor vacuuming robots." The same filing gives 73.8% of revenue for the year ended 31 December 2004 as coming from Roomba, on product revenue of 82.147 million dollars for 2004. Separately it names more than 200 PackBot tactical military robots sold to the US military, most of them deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq; those machines are teleoperated and have no bearing on autonomy, and appear here only as the second revenue line. The atlas already holds the arrival of the Roomba in September 2002; this record is about something else, the first count of how many there were that a filing confirms.