Just a little more than a year ago, home appliance maker Electrolux acquired sous vide startup Anova. Yesterday, we got to see some of the fruits of that acquisition as Electrolux announced it was using the Anova team to help launch the Pure i9 robotic vacuum.
At first glance, this might seem a little incongruous. The maker of a sous vide machine being used to launch a vacuum? But the press announcement shines a little more light on the subject and the reasoning becomes clear. Electrolux said it was using the Anova team in San Francisco to handle “the entire customer experience–from pre-purchase to post-purchase and everything in-between.”
The robot vacuum market has a lot of players, and Electrolux faces stiff competition here as most people probably already associate robot vacuums with the Roomba. Electrolux is going to need all the help it can get.
What this shows is that Electrolux wasn’t just buying a sous vide cooker — it was picking up a whole team with experience in breaking new products in the U.S. market. Anova has already had success launching one product in a nascent category, stands to reason they have a good shot at replicating that success. Plus, both the sous vide machine and Pure i9 are devices you program though a mobile app, so the company knows how consumers interact with phone-controlled devices.
Can Anova’s precision carryover from the kitchen into home cleaning? Stay tuned to see if their marketing savvy can make room for this robot.
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