Specimen 014 — Anki Cozmo: The $180 Toy Robot That Needed One More Investor (2026)

Anki's Cozmo was a palm-sized robot with a black cube-shaped OLED screen for a face, two treads, one excavator-like lifting arm and three illuminated sensor cubes it could find, lift and roll. Its expressions came from a purpose-built "emotion engine" and from the animator Carlos Baena, who had worked at Pixar; the animation was authored in Autodesk Maya. Anki reached the United States market with Cozmo on Oct 16, 2016 at $180, and the product worked — by August 2018 the company had sold 1.5 million robots and claimed Cozmo as the best-selling toy on Amazon. Anki had raised $182 million since 2010 (Crunchbase's total, cited by TechCrunch; other reports put it above $200 million) and reported close to $100 million in revenue for 2017. On April 29, 2019 a late-stage financing deal with a strategic investor fell through, and about 200 employees were let go, effective May 1, 2019. Anki's assets, including Cozmo and Vector, were acquired by the Pittsburgh company Digital Dream Labs that December. 1 2 3 4 5