Recently-restructured robotic toy maker Sphero acquires Specdrums, which on Kickstarter sold $175K worth of rings that make music by tapping on colored surfaces
Ashley Carman / The Verge :
Context & Ripple Effects
This acquisition lands mid-pivot: weeks earlier, Sphero had raised $12M with plans for $20M more as it shifted focus to education following January layoffs (the $12M raise). Specdrums — a crowdfunded product that turned colored surfaces into a musical instrument — is a small, cheap way to broaden the education portfolio beyond rolling robots.
The pattern holds afterward: Sphero went on to crowdfund the hackable RVR with an expansion port for accessories like Raspberry Pi (RVR's Kickstarter campaign) and then acquired littleBits' electronics building kits (the littleBits deal), making Specdrums the first tuck-in of an education-first strategy.
First-order effects
- Specdrums' Kickstarter backers get their $175K-funded ring product backed by an established manufacturer with retail and school-channel distribution, instead of a two-person startup scaling alone.
- Sphero gains a music-and-color-sensing product line it did not have to develop internally, extending its catalog past app-controlled ball robots at minimal cost.
Second-order effects
- Rivals in educational robotics face a buyer consolidating small STEM-hardware makers into multi-category portfolios — a playbook Sphero repeats with littleBits a year later.
- Kickstarter-validated hardware becomes a visible sourcing pipeline for established toy companies, raising the odds that successful campaigns end in acquisition rather than independent scale-up.
Third-order effects
- If the sequence continues, toy robotics consolidates around education platforms that assemble sensing, coding, and electronics products by acquisition — with the original inventors exiting rather than competing.
- The shift also entrenches schools as the primary customer for former toy makers, since education revenue is what Sphero's post-layoff restructuring and subsequent CEO change were built around.
The trend: Consumer robotics companies are remaking themselves as education-platform acquirers, using small crowdfunded hardware deals to assemble STEM portfolios faster than internal development allows.