Lumoid, a technology equipment rental start-up, is no longer in business and its founder Aarthi Ramamurthy goes to Facebook.
The start-up launched as a "crazy idea", when he left Y Combinator four and a half years ago, Ramamurthy wrote on a Facebook post this weekend to announce the closure.
Lumoid has raised nearly $ 6 million over the past four years. This spring, the company announced that it had reached an agreement with Best Buy, which would soon allow customers to rent equipment at a big box store.
"We built what people wanted, accomplished a lot as a small team, we had a lot of fun in the process and we learned a lot," Ramamurthy said. "… we are all crazy for doing what we did, and grateful for our investors who believed in us when no one else did it."
But sometimes, customer demand, an agreement with Best Buy and investors who believe in your vision are not enough, especially when it comes to changing the business.
Ramamurthy told TechCrunch that she had been trying to secure the funds needed to prepare for this Best Buy partnership, but that she was unable to do so. "As a result, we decided to liquidate the company," she said.
Lumoid has since worked to sell the assets she owned, repay part of the debt and help find new roles for team members.
"Although this is not the result we obviously wanted, I'm glad we were able to build Lumoid and extend it to thousands of customers, ship hundreds of thousands of Lumoid equipment, and learn a lot about the construction process, "Ramamurthy told TechCrunch.
It would be logical for Ramamurthy to want to start another business after it has not worked. She has experience in growing and scaling startups as a serial entrepreneur. She co-founded another test company before buying True & Co, spent some time as a contractor-in-residence at Battery Ventures, and before that, she worked on building devices. SDK at Netflix and on the Xbox Live team at Microsoft. But she does not return to entrepreneurship – at least not for a while.
Ramamurthy will instead take on a new role with the Facebook payments team. Her husband Sriram Krishnan worked on Facebook a few years ago before jumping on Snap and Twitter. But she said that she was introduced to several members of the Payments Team at the Women in Product conference in September and that the talks started from there.
"I just finished my first week on Facebook and it was a very good swirl," she said.
But going from what could have been a success with just a little more time and money is always bittersweet. "I've been receiving emails from customers over the last few months for the service to continue and it's been sweet – we're sorry to wind it up and we've been very lucky to have those customers." passionate, "said Ramamurthy.