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Graveyard

iRobot
After Amazon's USD 1.7B acquisition was terminated on January 29, 2024 over EU antitrust concerns, iRobot cut ~31% of its workforce and issued a going-concern warning as revenue kept declining through 2024-2025. It filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Delaware on December 14, 2025. A prepackaged plan was confirmed in January 2026, and on January 23, 2026 Shenzhen PICEA Robotics completed its acquisition of 100% of iRobot's equity, taking the company private as a PICEA subsidiary. IRBT shares were delisted from Nasdaq on closing, ending iRobot's run as an independent public company.
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Latch
Latch built smart locks and access software for apartments and went public in 2021 via a Tishman Speyer SPAC at roughly a USD 1.5B valuation. From 2022 it disclosed improper revenue recognition that made financial results back to 2019 unreliable; the resulting investigation forced restatements, the resignation of CEO Luke Schoenfelder and other executives, major layoffs, and a prolonged loss of compliant SEC reporting. The company survived but narrowed sharply, and in August 2025 rebranded as DOOR, repositioning entirely around B2B 'building intelligence' for the multifamily rental market. That move ended the Latch brand and its consumer smart-home ambitions, exiting the consumer category even as the entity continues as DOOR.
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Level Home
Level Home built design-led 'invisible' smart locks and raised roughly USD 171M, but could not sustain independence as a standalone consumer-hardware startup. On September 10, 2024, Swedish lock giant ASSA ABLOY acquired Level's smart-lock hardware business, intellectual property, the Level brand, and related teams, absorbing them into its consumer access portfolio alongside Yale and August. Level's separate multifamily software platform was spun out as a new ASSA ABLOY subsidiary, Ambient Property Technologies. Level Home thereby ceased to operate as an independent company.
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Brilliant
Brilliant raised roughly USD 70M for its in-wall smart-home control panels but ran out of money in 2024, laying off its entire staff and shutting its support center while it searched for a buyer. On August 28, 2024, Almeida Strategic Investments (brothers Evan and Michael Almeida), partnering with David Blum's Cullinan Holdings, acquired Brilliant's assets out of distress and relaunched the business as Brilliant NextGen, headquartered in San Mateo and refocused on professional homebuilders and property managers. The original venture-backed Brilliant entity ceased to operate, and the consumer-facing business effectively wound down.
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Wink
Wink launched in 2014 as one of the first mainstream multi-protocol smart-home hubs out of Quirky, survived Quirky's 2015 bankruptcy via a USD ~15M sale to Flextronics, and was acquired by will.i.am's i.am+ in 2017. It never shipped a major new hub after 2016, and its parent reportedly struggled financially. In May 2020 Wink abruptly imposed a mandatory USD 4.99/month subscription, warning users they would lose hub access otherwise; the widely criticized move bled away its user base. Service degraded further with a multi-week outage in 2022, and Wink faded into effective shutdown without ever relaunching as a viable platform.
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Insteon
Insteon's parent, Irvine-based Smartlabs, became insolvent and in mid-April 2022 abruptly shut down Insteon's cloud servers with no advance notice to customers. The shutdown disabled the Insteon mobile apps, remote access, and voice control overnight, and users who factory-reset their hubs were left with bricked devices, while others retained only basic local switch functionality. Executives reportedly removed Insteon and Smartlabs references from their LinkedIn profiles, and the company later attributed the failure to pandemic and supply-chain problems. Smartlabs/Insteon effectively ceased operations, becoming a definitive 'Internet of Bricks' cautionary tale. (A group of users later acquired the brand assets to partially revive service.)
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