Case Study

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The Situation

Intellibot Robotics designs and manufactures industrial robots for commercial cleaning applications, based in Richmond, VA. A typical customer might be a Target store that utilized the robots to clean the store every night. The company had been a research and development company for many years. It had developed in design its own commercial robot from scratch. The technology had been perfected and the products were ready for aggressive market rollout. The primary investor had invested a significant amount of capital into the company and decided that they had invested the maximum amount. The next step for the company’s growth was to build out its sales and marketing operation both nationally and internationally. The budget for the rollout would be a multimillion dollar operation. The primary investor decided that rather than continue investing additional capital in the company, they would sell it to a larger firm that already had the marketing and distribution power.

The Response

The company thought that the likely solution would be to sell the company to one of the four dominant companies in the industrial cleaning industry. We had extensive negotiations which each of these companies. It turns out that the industrial cleaning market was fairly old school and the companies were not eager to embrace new technologies. As a result, these potential buyers, who we initially thought would be quite good, were unwilling to pay an attractive price for the company. Several made offers but they were not attractive.

We expanded our search efforts to Japanese firms and other international companies. We also contacted other robotics companies as well as venture capital firms who had financed companies with robotic technologies.

The Solution

We continued our search efforts, contacting a number of additional buyers, including Sealed Air based in the Netherlands. Sealed Air is a $7 billion conglomerate with four business areas: specialty packaging, food packaging, medical application products and commercial cleaning. We completed a transaction with Sealed Air and they successfully added the robotic product line to their commercial cleaning division.