Jordan O'BrienNinja Blocks, the company formed from a Kickstarter campaign, has officially run out of cash, despite raising nearly £400,000 on the crowdfunding site.
The Sydney-based firm was developing a home automation computer dubbed the Sphere, which promised to offer a cheaper way of creating a smart home.
Using sensors placed across the home, users would receive notification from the Ninja Sphere telling them where their phone was in the house, or whether or not they’ve left the heating on.
The company had already seen success with its first Kickstarter project, so the firm attempted to go bigger for its second.
Unfortunately the money has now run out, with the company now informing backers that some won’t get all the Spheres they ordered.
“Even with all the ninjas earning far below what they would expect to get somewhere else, our burn rate couldn’t be sustained forever,” the Ninja Blocks team announced in a blog post.
“Ninja Blocks has always run lean, and when the next round of investment fell through we didn’t have much runway left to adjust our course.”
The company hasn’t just burned through the funding from Kickstarter either, with £500,000 worth of investement from BlackBird Ventures and SingTel Innov8 also having been spent.
So what went wrong? Well, it was rather simple – the production of the hardware ran overtime and over-budget.
It’s not all doom and gloom for backers, with the company promising to get at least one Sphere to every backer, although those that ordered more than one may not receive all they paid for.
Those who didn’t get in early and bought the Sphere from Kickstarter are being offered refunds, as long as they bought it directly from Ninja Blocks.
There’s little hope that the business will rise from the ashes, with the blog post all but confirming the firm’s closure.
“Ninja Blocks, the company, will almost surely be dead,” the blog post read.
“However, we hope the community continues to use and keep building on the platform we’ve built. We’re crazy proud of it, and it would be a shame if it died too.
“We are all proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish, feel privileged to have worked on such an ambitious project, and most of all humbled by the community that built up around our small team.”
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