They suffered because Rethink prioritized safety and cost over speed and precision and baked those decisions into the hardware itself. Those design choices limited the type of applications where the robots could be used as well as the company's ability to reengineer the robots to improve their performance.

What happened Rethink Robotics?

Rethink Robotics, the Boston, Mass. -based maker of collaborative robots Baxter and Sawyer, shut its doors today. Rethink was founded in 2008 and raised nearly $150 million to date, according to Crunchbase. Its last round of funding was an $18 million Series E in August 2017.

When did Rethink Robotics fail?

In early October 2018, news broke that Rethink Robotics — the pioneering company behind the Baxter and Sawyer cobots — was shutting down.