Juicero was a Wi-Fi-connected juice press that cost $699, then $399, and on September 1, 2017 the company that made it shut down for good, roughly sixteen months after the product went on sale. The machine did one thing: it took a single-serving pack of pre-chopped, pre-pressed produce — sold only by Juicero, on a subscription, scanned by a barcode reader, refused if past its expiry or recalled — and squeezed it into a cup of cold-pressed juice. It was a beautifully engineered appliance built to perform a task that, as the world memorably discovered, two human hands could do about as well and a great deal more cheaply.
The pitch was pure mid-2010s Silicon Valley: the “Keurig for juice,” a hardware-plus-recurring-revenue business wrapped in wellness aspiration and aluminum so over-built that a teardown likened its internal frame to something from an aircraft. Investors believed it. Juicero raised roughly $120 million — by some counts $134 million — from a marquee list including Google Ventures (now GV) and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a sum that for a juice startup beggared belief and, in hindsight, narrated the whole tech-bubble mood in one line item. The company launched the press in 2016 at $699, cut it to $399 in early 2017 to chase volume, and was reportedly burning around $4 million a month.
The end arrived not as a market verdict but as a single demonstration. On April 19, 2017, Bloomberg published a report — with video — showing that Juicero’s proprietary produce packs could be wrung out by hand, yielding nearly the same amount of juice in nearly the same time, no $400 machine required. The internet did the rest. The image of a person squeezing a juice bag into a glass while a sleek connected appliance sat idle beside them became an instant parable for everything overfunded and over-engineered in consumer tech. The CEO published a defense; it did not help.
Sales were suspended, refunds offered, and the search for a buyer began. None of it worked. Juicero shut its doors, the press joined the small museum of gadgets remembered chiefly for being absurd, and a $120-million company became permanent shorthand for a question every hardware founder now has to answer out loud: what, exactly, does the device do that the customer could not do without it?
Jibo was an $899 tabletop robot billed as “the world’s first social robot for the home,” and in 2019 its servers were switched off and it went dark — roughly two years after the first units shipped and nearly five years after the crowdfunding campaign that made it a phenomenon. Built around a swiveling head, a round screen, two cameras, a microphone array, and a deliberately expressive personality, Jibo was meant to be a companion: it would recognize faces, turn to whoever was speaking, tell jokes, dance, take photos, and answer questions, less an assistant than a character that lived on your counter. It was designed by MIT roboticist Cynthia Breazeal, a founding figure in the field of social robotics, and it carried genuine pedigree into a market that did not yet exist.
The money followed the promise. After a 2014 Indiegogo campaign that raised around $3.7 million in preorders — at the time one of the platform’s most successful technology projects — Jibo, Inc. went on to raise tens of millions more in venture capital, with reported totals upward of $70 million. Expectations ran high and the timeline ran long: backers who ordered in 2014 waited until late 2017 to receive their robots, by which point the world they were entering had changed underneath them.
That world now had the Amazon Echo and Google Home — cylinders that cost a fraction of Jibo’s price and answered the same questions faster, with a vastly larger ecosystem behind them. Against them, Jibo’s charm could not carry its limits. Reviewers admired the personality and the engineering and found the actual abilities thin: it was, in the unkind shorthand of the moment, a tablet on a swivel that cost $899 and did less than a $50 speaker. The company laid off most of its staff in 2018 and sold its assets, and the servers Jibo depended on were scheduled to go offline.
What made Jibo’s death unusual was the death itself. As the shutdown approached in 2019, the robots delivered an on-device farewell — a short message, and a final dance, telling owners it had enjoyed its time with them and hoping that someday, when robots were more advanced, they might tell theirs that Jibo said hello. The moment was widely covered and genuinely moving to many owners, who had, against their own better judgment, come to feel something for a machine that was about to stop being able to feel anything back.
Ouya was a $99 Android-powered game console that promised to break open the closed, expensive world of console gaming, and on June 25, 2019 its servers went dark and bricked much of what the device could still do. It began as one of the great crowdfunding stories: in the summer of 2012 the Ouya Kickstarter raised about $8.6 million from roughly 63,000 backers, hit its goal in a matter of hours, and arrived freighted with the hopes of everyone who wanted gaming to be cheap, open, and free of the gatekeeping of Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo. It launched in June 2013 as a small black box you plugged into your television, ran Android games, and let anyone develop for. The dream did not survive contact with the product.
What backers and buyers received was underwhelming on nearly every axis. The hardware felt cheap, the controller was widely criticized as clunky and laggy, and the storefront was thin — a small catalog of mostly minor games, many of them free-to-try ports, with few reasons to keep the console connected to the television. The “open console” pitch was real, but openness without a compelling library is just an empty shelf, and the novelty that drove the Kickstarter curdled quickly into buyer’s remorse. Sales after the initial crowdfunded wave were poor.
Ouya the company could not make the economics work, and in 2015 the gaming-hardware maker Razer acquired its software assets, folding the storefront and content into its own Forge TV effort and ending the Ouya hardware line. For a few years the servers limped on, letting existing owners still reach the store and re-download what they had bought. Then Razer set a hard date: on June 25, 2019, it would deactivate Ouya accounts and shut down all online elements of the service.
When that date came, much of the Ouya experience simply stopped working. The store closed, purchases could no longer be downloaded, and games that phoned home for licensing or content broke, leaving owners able to play only what was already installed and self-contained on the box. A console that had been sold on the promise of openness ended as a sealed brick — a small black reminder that a record-breaking Kickstarter buys a launch, not a future.
Anki was the consumer-robotics startup that made the genre’s most charming products and then collapsed almost overnight when a single financing deal fell through. Founded in 2010 by three Carnegie Mellon robotics PhDs — Boris Sofman, Mark Palatucci, and Hanns Tappeiner — the company launched its first product, the AI-driven racing game Anki Drive, in 2013, and went on to build Cozmo (2016) and Vector (2018), two small desktop robots widely praised for genuine personality. On April 29, 2019, Anki told its roughly 200 employees that the company was shutting down within days. It was bankrupt.
The waste was the painful part. Anki was not a vaporware outfit or a crowdfunding ghost. It had raised in the region of $185 million from serious investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, and JP Morgan; it had reportedly sold around 1.5 million robots, including hundreds of thousands of Cozmo units; and its products were good — Cozmo and Vector were among the few home robots that critics and owners actually loved rather than tolerated. The robots used expressive movement, a tiny animated face, and real computer-vision and on-board AI to do something most “social robots” only claimed to do: feel alive on a desk.
What killed Anki was the brutal economics underneath the charm. Building a hardware-and-software company that designs custom robots, runs the cloud services behind them, and funds the next product is enormously capital-intensive, and Anki was burning through its money faster than the robots could replenish it. The company was negotiating a major new round when, in the CEO’s words, a significant deal at a late stage fell through with a strategic investor. Without that bridge, a business that lived on outside funding had no runway left.
The end was abrupt and the human cost was real: about 200 staff were laid off with minimal notice and little severance, a sober reminder that behind every “startup shuts down” headline are families that lost a paycheck without warning. The robots themselves were not entirely abandoned. In December 2019, the edtech firm Digital Dream Labs acquired Anki’s assets and later revived Vector, keeping its cloud services running and giving the little robot — and the people who had bonded with it — an unexpected second life. Anki’s products earned their affection; the company simply ran out of the cash that affection alone could never supply.