Amazon wants to acquire Roomba maker iRobot for $1.7 billion

Amazon wants to acquire iRobot, the company behind the famous Roomba vacuum cleaning robots, for $ 1.7 billion. Converted, that is 1.67 billion euros. Amazon is offering $61 per iRobot share, which is 22 percent more than what the stock costs on the market.

The deal is not final yet; it must be approved by the shareholders of the American company and the US competition authorities, but iRobot itself has already agreed. If the sale actually closes, Amazon wants the current iRobot CEO, Colin Angle, to stay in his position.

The extent to which iRobot will remain a separate company that can to some extent continue to follow its own course is not clear at this time. It is clear, however, that Amazon will gain a larger share of the smart home market with this acquisition. It already has a nice share of that with its Ring doorbells and Alexa on various Echo devices.

IRobot recently released iRobotOS out, which should make the robot vacuum cleaners involved smarter thanks to information and computing power from the cloud. Amazon also recently released the robotic assistant Astro. IRobot has been around since 1990 and is seen as a pioneer in the field of vacuum cleaning robots.

iRobot Roomba i3+