Dear Bruno,

We have bad news. As is the norm with almost all crowdfunded projects we have always relied on « normal » investment in addition to the money raised on Indiegogo. As the project was delayed due to the hard technical challenge and the cost for producing a single camera ended up being much higher than estimated, that reliance on traditional investment only rose. Today we are sad to have to announce that this time – unlike many times before – we did not manage to raise additional funding in time.

In accordance with German law we were forced to file an application for insolvency / bankruptcy protection a couple of weeks ago. Since then we have been in a state of « temporary insolvency » during which the government-appointed temporary insolvency administrator is looking for buyers interested in buying the assets of the company. « Assets » means inventory, software, the rights to the hardware, almost all employee contracts, IP rights etc. But not the obligations towards external parties, like suppliers – or Indiegogo supporters.

There are interested buyers and the sale should be completed at the start of next week. Then the « business » of Panono will be transferred to a new company that is not related to the old Panono GmbH and is not obligated to send cameras to Indiegogo supporters. Because of that I will not work in the new company that is buying the assets. I don’t have and will not have any influence over any offer or message the new owners of the assets of the Panono GmbH may send to Indiegogo supporters. As shareholders the founders will also not profit from this sale, as the money will be used by the insolvency administrator to pay outstanding invoices and other debt first.

I want to personally thank you for your support and for believing in the project. Our Indiegogo supporters have shown an amazing amount of understanding even as the project was delayed again and again. This meant a great deal to us and helped the team to pull through a lot of difficult times. While continuously struggling to raise enough money to keep the project going we still managed to deliver around 400 Indiegogo cameras. This was partly financed by sales and partly by fresh investment.

In 2016 – the first full year of shipping the camera – we had a revenue of about 2.7M EUR. While that revenue was increasing it did not yet finance our costs. We were expecting to reach that point during 2017 but sadly were not able to secure the needed additional financing to get there.

While we are happy that, as far as we know, the cloud service will continue to be operated by the new owners so that the already delivered cameras will continue to be fully functional, the reason why the founders and the team have been working very hard for the last years was to eventually be able to send out all Indiegogo cameras. We are truly sorry that we could not achieve that goal in the end. 

It has been an been an amazing but also exhausting journey and I and the team feel incredibly fortunate to have had so many dedicated and understanding supporters along the way.

Kind regards,

Jonas