Anki was a robotics and artificial intelligence startup that put robotics technology in products for children. Anki programmed physical objects to be intelligent and adaptable in the physical world, and aimed to solve the problems of positioning, reasoning, and execution in artificial intelligence and robotics. The company debuted Anki Drive during the 2013 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference keynote. The company received $50 million in Series A and Series Bventure funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, and Two Sigma. In September 2014, Anki announced that it has raised another $55 million in Series C venture funding led by JP Morgan. In June 2016, the company announced its latest round of funding, which amounted to $52.5M, also led by JP Morgan. Total funding to date is $182.5 million. Marc Andreessen and Danny Rimer serve on the company's board, in addition to the three co-founders. It went bankrupt in April 2019 and shut down the following month. In December 2019, Anki assets, including OVERDRIVE, Cozmo, and Vector, were acquired by Digital Dream Labs.
History
Anki was founded by Boris Sofman, Mark Palatucci, and Hanns Tappeiner, founded officially in 2010 and was headquartered in San Francisco. It also had locations in Europe.
Products
Anki Drive & Anki OVERDRIVE
Anki's first product, Anki Drive, was released in Apple stores in the U.S. and Canada, on Apple.com and Anki.com starting October 23, 2013. It retailed for $149.99, with additional cars available for $49.99 and Expansion Tracks for $69.99 Anki Drive is a racing game that combined an iOS app, called "Anki Drive," with physical race cars. Each car is equipped with optical sensors, wireless chips, motors, and artificial intelligence software. Anki OVERDRIVE, an upgraded version of Drive with different cars and modular tracks, was released in September 2015.
Cozmo
In October 2016, Anki launched Cozmo in the US. Cozmo is a robot about 4 inches by 3 by 2 inches. It is mostly white, with red details, and gray on the end of its robot arm. There is a light on top of its body, with a grey border, which can shine different colors. A "collector's edition" Cozmo was released in 2017, with a "Liquid Metal" smoked grey chrome finish. A "limited edition" Cozmo, with an "Interstellar Blue" blue, white, and grey finish, was released in 2018. Cozmo comes with three illuminated cubes it communicates with in order to play games and can autonomously move, lift and roll the cubes, and the cubes are powered by LR1, N, AM5, E90, batteries for power
Vector
In September 2018, Anki launched Vector. It was designed to be more helpful, instead of being purely a toy. It is approximately the same size as Cozmo, and its design and shape are essentially the same, except Vector is mostly black with gray details and a gold border around its light on top, which shines green by default, blue when waiting for a voice command, red when muted, white when thinking, and slowly flashing orange when experiencing Wi-Fi connection difficulties. Vector uses 4 beaming microphone array to find out exactly where you are, and A gold touchpad where he can be petted. Vector has facial recognition technology and can respond to voice commands. It is cloud-connected and will update automatically. Its first major update came out on December 17, 2018 which allowed Vector to connect to Amazon Alexa.
