Cozmo and Vector: toy robots that sold well, from a company that fell first

A palm-sized robot with a Pixar animator’s touch

Anki was founded in 2010 by three graduates of Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute. Cozmo, launched in October 2016 for $179.99, was the size of a palm, with tank treads, a lift arm and an OLED face, and it played with three cubes that came in the box. Its animation team was led by Carlos Baena, who had worked on Toy Story 3 and Wall-E, and the company promoted an “emotion engine” that produced hundreds of emotions. The phone app acted as Cozmo’s brain. Vector, launched in October 2018 for $249, moved on its own without a phone, but used the company’s cloud for voice and other features.

$100 million in sales, and still it closed

Cozmo was the top-selling toy on Amazon in 2017, and Anki earned close to $100 million in revenue that year. By August 2018 it had sold 1.5 million robots. In April 2019, though, Anki let its staff go and shut down. A deal with a strategic investor fell through at the last minute, and the company said its revenue was not enough to support a hardware and software business. In December 2019 the edtech company Digital Dream Labs (DDL) bought its patents and trademarks. DDL relaunched Vector with a subscription and raised $545,000 on Kickstarter in 2020. In 2024, however, the retailer RobotShop said the Vector 2.0 servers had been down for more than a year, disabling features such as face recognition. The same year Pennsylvania’s attorney general sued DDL over about 14,000 orders, worth more than $4 million, that were never delivered.

The server owners built for themselves

Reviewers praised its personality. The Next Web called Vector “the closest thing I think there is to an always-on robot you can legitimately enjoy being around – without having to pretend it’s alive”, though it noted a battery life of about an hour. Researchers used Cozmo too: a study published in 2022 placed it in the homes of 306 participants for five days and chose it because it was low-cost and easy to use. When the servers stopped, owners built and released wire-pod, free server software for Vector.

The personality stayed; the servers didn’t

Cozmo showed that a robot’s personality can sell. But sales did not keep a hardware company alive. When a robot’s functions live on a server, every change of owner lands on the user. Jibo stopped with its company, and Moxie’s maker handed over a server at the very end. Vector is different because its owners built a server themselves and kept it going.

If the company that sold this robot changes hands, how much of what you bought is still yours?

What we haven’t confirmed

• Sales of Vector and of Cozmo 2.0
• The outcome of the Pennsylvania lawsuit, and whether refunds were paid
• The 2025–2026 relaunch under the ANKI name and its ChatGPT integration (found only in secondary sources)
• How many Vectors run on wire-pod today