Rethink Robotics was founded in 2008 by Rodney Brooks, the MIT roboticist who co-founded iRobot and built the behavior-based approach to robotics. Its bet was that factory robots did not have to live in cages. Its two-armed Baxter (2012) and one-armed Sawyer (2015) had cartoon faces on a screen, padded joints, and a “trainer” interface where a worker could grab an arm and show it a motion rather than program it - the first widely sold “collaborative robots,” meant to work safely beside people.
The engineering was real and durable. In his own account, Brooks notes that Rethink “delivered thousands of upper body Baxter and Sawyer humanoid robots (built in the US) to factories between 2012 and 2018,” and he points proudly to longevity: “A Sawyer robot that had operated in a factory in Oregon just got shut down in late 2025 with 35,236 hours on its operations clock.” Rethink also pioneered a clever safety feature - a passive circuit that used a powered-off motor’s own back-current as a brake.
But the business never matched the vision. Rethink raised about $150 million yet could not turn the collaborative-robot category it had created into enough profitable sales; competitors, especially in Asia, undercut it. A planned acquisition collapsed at the last moment, leaving the company short of cash, and on October 3, 2018 Rethink Robotics closed its doors. Its patents and technology were sold to Germany’s HAHN Group later that month.
Why business readers should care: Rethink invented a category and still failed at it. Being first and being admired did not protect a hardware company whose unit economics never closed and whose survival depended on a single acquisition that fell through. Pioneering a market is not the same as capturing it.