Anki Drive

History

The creators of Anki Drive, Boris Sofman, Mark Palatucci, and Hanns Tappeiner, first met as students in the PhD program at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute. After sketching out the idea of the Anki platform on a napkin, they moved to San Francisco, where they founded Anki. Anki Drive was their first product. According to the founders, transforming the initial idea into reality took "countless algorithms, late nights, more napkin sketches, and prototypes." Anki Drive was unveiled at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June 2013, where Sofman, the Anki CEO, described it as a "video game in the real world," adding that the company wants to bring robotics and AI out of the lab and into our everyday lives. The company's second product was another robot racing game, Anki Overdrive, unveiled in 2015. It was followed by Cozmo, a small programmable robot, and then Vector, a social AI-powered robot released in 2018. Anki raised a total of US $182.5 million from Andreessen Horowitz, JP Morgan, and other investors. In April 2019, after failing to secure a critical round of funding, Anki shut down. Later that year, Anki assets, including Overdrive, Cozmo, and Vector, were acquired by Digital Dream Labs, in Pittsburgh, Pa.