附近上门

, a robotics and AI toy startup that had raised around $200 million over time, has shut its doors, the company has confirmed (Recode originally .

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In a statement via email, Anki’s head of communications told us:

It is with a heavy heart to announce that Anki will be letting go of our employees, effective Wednesday. We鈥檝e shipped millions of units of product and left customers happy all over the world while building some of the most incredible technologies pointed toward a future with diverse AI and robotics driven applications. But without significant funding to support a hardware and software business and bridge to our long-term product roadmap, it is simply not feasible at this time. Despite our past successes, we pursued every financial avenue to fund our future product development and expand on our platforms. A significant financial deal at a late stage fell through with a strategic investor and we were not able to reach an agreement. We鈥檙e doing our best to take care of every single employee and their families, and our management team continues to explore all options available.

Anki was perhaps the most well-funded startups in the connected toys space. Over time, according to 附近上门 data, Anki had raised a total of at least聽 from investors such as , and , among others. Founded in 2010 by three Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute graduates, Anki was considered to be a 鈥渄arling鈥� in the field. Venture capitalist 聽in a 2013 blog post called Anki the “” he’d ever seen. 聽Andreessen once sat on the company鈥檚 board, from the time. A company spokesperson told 附近上门 News last September that its 2017 revenue 鈥渁pproached $100 [million]鈥� and revenue was expected to exceed that in 2018.

In 2016, I (Mary Ann) had the company for another publication and Sofman had told me: 聽“We started Anki with the goal of harnessing robotics and AI to bring to life consumer products with unprecedented level of intellect and interactive capabilities.鈥�

But its closure is not entirely a surprise.

In September 2018, we covered a likely financial shakeup at the company, surfaced in a pair of SEC filings. The first document detailed an equity transaction targeting $27.24 million in 鈥淪eries 1 Preferred鈥� stock. 附近上门 News had seen the Series 1 label before when we broke the story that Andreessen-backed tee shirt design marketplace Teespring re-capitalized, wiping out tens of millions of dollars worth of common stockholder equity in the process. The last round raised by Anki prior to the Series 1 deal was a Series D. Based on prior experience covering distressed Andreessen Horowitz portfolio companies, there鈥檚 strong reason to believe that Anki鈥檚 investors re-capitalized the company in 2018.

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