The Roomba j7+ Is Discontinued and iRobot Was Sold Out of Bankruptcy: What Owners Should Do Now

iRobot cut the j7+ in March 2025, warned on going concern days earlier, filed Chapter 11 in December and emerged in January 2026 owned by Shenzhen Picea Robotics.

The Roomba j7+ is not something you can buy from iRobot. It is a trade-in credit. iRobot’s own Roomba store page lists no j7 or j7+ for sale, naming the j7 only among the models eligible for trade-in. That is the smaller half of the story. In March 2025 iRobot scrapped every robot vacuum it made except the Combo 10 Max. In December it filed for Chapter 11. In January 2026 it came out the other side wholly owned by a Shenzhen manufacturer. If you own a j7+, the live question is not whether to upgrade but what happens to the service it depends on.

The short version, in dates

• 9 September 2021: the j7+ is announced at 849 dollars with its Clean Base, the dockless j7 at 649 dollars
• 12 March 2025: iRobot’s annual filing carries a going-concern warning and the shares fall sharply
• 18 March 2025: four replacement models go on pre-sale and almost the whole existing Roomba range is cut
• 14 December 2025: iRobot files a pre-packaged Chapter 11 and its common stock stops trading publicly
• January 2026: iRobot emerges wholly owned by Shenzhen Picea Robotics, still based in Bedford, Massachusetts

From an 849 dollar flagship to a line on a trade-in form

iRobot announced the j7+ on 9 September 2021 at 849 dollars with the Clean Base, or 649 dollars for the j7 without a dock. Its headline trick was obstacle avoidance, sold with a guarantee iRobot called the Pet Owner Official Promise: a replacement for any j7+ that failed to avoid solid pet waste. Read the terms and the promise was narrower than the marketing, limited to one year from purchase, offering replacement product only, and available in limited jurisdictions.

TechRadar reported the clear-out in March 2025. iRobot wiped out and replaced almost its entire fleet in one go, keeping only the Roomba Combo 10 Max and putting four new machines on pre-sale from 18 March 2025 in North America and parts of Europe: the Roomba 105 Combo, the Roomba 205 DustCompactor, the Roomba Plus 405 Combo and the Roomba Plus 505 Combo. The j7 family was not among the survivors.

How the money ran out

The discontinuation was not a product decision made from strength. The sequence, drawn from The Robot Report and Silicon Republic, runs like this.

1. 2022: Amazon announces a 1.7 billion dollar acquisition of iRobot.
2. Early 2024: the European Commission’s antitrust objections kill the deal. Amazon pays a 94 million dollar break fee, part of which repays a Carlyle Group loan, and iRobot cuts 31 percent of its staff.
3. Late 2024: a further round removes roughly half of what remained, some 105 employees.
4. 12 March 2025: auditors state in the FY2024 annual filing that a history of operating losses and negative cash flows raises substantial doubt about the company’s ability to continue as a going concern. iRobot warns it may be forced to curtail or cease operations if its strategic review fails.
5. Second quarter of 2025: revenue of 127.6 million dollars, down 23.3 percent year on year, against 24.8 million dollars of cash.
6. November 2025: Santrum Hong Kong, a subsidiary of Shenzhen Picea Robotics, buys 190.6 million dollars of iRobot principal and interest from Carlyle affiliates. iRobot separately owes Picea 161.5 million dollars for manufacturing, 90.9 million of it past due. Picea sets a 15 January 2026 deadline for audited financials.
7. 14 December 2025: iRobot files a pre-packaged Chapter 11 and Picea takes the company outright.

Who owns the servers your vacuum talks to now

iRobot emerged in January 2026 as a wholly owned United States subsidiary of Picea, still headquartered in Bedford, Massachusetts, with Gary Cohen continuing as chief executive. Anticipating objections to Chinese ownership of a company whose products map the inside of American houses, iRobot set up iRobot Safe Corp, a US subsidiary governed by an independent board of US citizens with dedicated data-security staff. Debt-reduction figures were not disclosed.

iRobot says it supports a fleet of more than 50 million devices sold, and no remote removal of j7+ features has been documented. The risk for an owner is continuity rather than any announced cut: app and cloud services for a model the company no longer sells, run by a business that has just been through bankruptcy under new ownership. The Robot Report’s coverage carries a reader complaint about poor spare-parts availability even for recent machines, which is the practical form that risk usually takes.

The screenshots that came off development j7 units

There is a specific reason to think about where a Roomba’s data goes, and it involves this exact model. On 19 December 2022 MIT Technology Review published 15 screenshots captured by development versions of the Roomba J7 between June and November 2020. One showed a woman sitting on a toilet. Another showed a child lying on a hallway floor. The images had been posted to private Facebook and Discord groups by gig workers in Venezuela who were annotating training data for Scale AI.

iRobot said it had taken every precaution to ensure personal data was processed securely, and the then chief executive Colin Angle said the company was ending its relationship with the provider that leaked the images and that the leak breached an NDA with Scale AI. A follow-up on 10 January 2023 reported that the testers themselves felt misled by the consent agreements they had signed. The units involved were development hardware, not retail machines, which is the fair qualification. It is still the clearest published account of what these robots see.

If your j7+ is still running

Nothing about the bankruptcy stops the machine working today, and there is no reason to throw out a vacuum that cleans your floors. A few things are worth doing anyway.

• Stock consumables now rather than later. Filters, brushes and dirt-disposal bags for a discontinued model are the first things to become hard to find.
• Check what your app account holds. Home maps and imagery sit on servers owned by a company that changed hands in January 2026.
• Do not count on the Pet Owner Official Promise. It ran for one year from purchase, so it has expired on every j7+ sold.
• No subscription is needed to run a Roomba. iRobot did operate an iRobot Select membership from late 2021, but its current status is not something we could confirm from iRobot.

What 269.99 dollars buys in 2026 that 849 dollars bought in 2021

The nearest functional replacement for a j7+, meaning self-emptying and obstacle-avoiding in the middle of the range, is the Roomba 105 Combo with AutoEmpty Dock at 269.99 dollars on iRobot’s own store as of 1 September 2026. The rest of the range on that page runs from the Roomba 105 Vac with AutoEmpty Dock at 249.99 dollars and the Roomba 205 DustCompactor Combo at 469.99, through the Roomba Plus 405 Combo at 799.99, to the Roomba Max 705 Combo at 1,299.99 and the Combo 10 Max at 1,399.99.

Put plainly, the price of the thing a j7+ did has fallen from 849 dollars to 269.99 in four years. That is the genuine good news in this story, and it is also the reason to be careful: whatever you buy from iRobot now comes with a warranty underwritten by a company that emerged from Chapter 11 eight months ago. Buyers who want a robot vacuum from a manufacturer with an uneventful balance sheet should shop outside the brand entirely, and there is no dishonour in saying so.

Sources: iRobot · TechRadar · The Robot Report · Silicon Republic · MIT Technology Review